aosid's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - The basement was summer's graveyard. Plastic balls clicked at plastic cups over a scuffed table and a ravaged box of cheap beer. The room buzzed with over-loud laughter and faceless underground hip hop, the sort everyone pretends to like. It was nearly surprising not to find a fire of old particle board and cigarette cartons guttering in the backyard. There were the old friends returned from new lives to revisit the glory days, breaking familiar jokes through foreign-weathered faces; there were the local acquaintances polite and bawdy; there were the insufferable gatecrashers out to impress unimpressed strangers with unbelievable boasts. And there was her. She was many things, all of them echoes of warmer months: a well-known attractive face from campus, the host's former failed romance, an old accomplice in pleasantly simple games on the lake, an ex-lover's sister. He still didn't trust her unexpected civility, so kept a respectful distance: not so far as the blatant avoidance that was his old habit but certainly farther than the frat-boy vultures and their grating attempts at ingratiating conversation. And then she asked him why it ended, the old story she knew him from. He managed to stammer a response, old stock of the sort he handed to everyone. The surprise and the lingering wariness kept him from being specific or wholly truthful, and at any rate he had been attempting to leave just before the question. But as he kept his usual vigil later that night, a lonely vigil of endless mindless labor and endless mindless thought, he found a little bitter smirk tugging at his right cheek. There was a frightening question. And its answers held a curious property, wherein they are desperately sought and desperately avoided, all at once. 8:43 a.m. - 2013-02-27 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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