INTERIOR EAST HOLLYWOOD
“You know sometimes, I need more from you. Where do we meet and get real about it. When is someone going to push me down the stairs?”
“Give people what they want, so they want what you give them.” Eloise says out-loud not facing me, sitting at her wooden desk in her small East Hollywood apartment.
I’m sitting on her couch barefoot, I’m wearing white dress pants and a dirty white t-shirt with white paint stains on both. Her couch is brown and cracked, real leather. I know because I smelled it. I let my nose press against it for a while. There’s a green craftsman house across the street with a white fence. I miss flat land, I miss being able to walk across flat streets. Everything in Los Angeles to me, is winding and challenging and vertical. Hillside houses, stuff on the edge. Whenever I leave Eloise’s house at night, there are hundreds of slugs and caterpillars climbing in the small planted garden outside her house, I feel it too, I also feel like a cursed little roll of jelly with no eyes climbing around on a decorative garden, pretending it’s the woods.
“I’m done sad writing. I’m not sad, I believe in everything so fuck sad writing and go eat breakfast,” I think to myself.
“You should really try meditating,” an anonymous person online named “freehalloweensocks” tells me in a DM, which I read while sitting on Eloise’s couch as she continues talking to me.
I hear birds, I hear an ambulance, I hear a car approaching, and fading away. I see a yellow butterfly pass by her window. I see a woman in a blue zip up sweatshirt across the street in the green Craftsman. Her face is blocked by the tree in her yard. She’s speaking to someone sitting in a hanging chair, I can’t see their face either. I imagine they’re old.
“...nothing a short dress can’t fix, hopefully…” Eloise continues, pacing around the room.
“Also none of my clothes fit and I can’t control my weight so I’m kind stressing about that having serious body dysmorphia.”
“I dunno not my day.” she adds.
She goes quiet after that, I give it some time before responding so she feels like I’m thinking about it, like I’m processing. I’m waiting the appropriate amount of time to figure out the best thing to say, that would save her. But I’m not, I’m only thinking about how I seem to her right now, what is my face doing - does it give it away? Can she hear this? Is she reading this now?
“I think you’re in reset mode” I say to her, which is met with silence.
A kid in a yellow short sleeve shirt is waving a piece of metal around like a sword in the Craftsman front yard and running the metal along the white fence making scraping sounds.
“Yeah, I’m trying,” she finally adds. I hear a man's voice from across the street talking to someone inside the Craftsman. The kid in the yellow shirt is now facing the house, listening but still waving the piece of metal.
“I’m also just trying to do that without being a slut, you know? Before you, I was always with someone and I don’t want to do that.”
“So I’m learning to be alone.” She says after a long pause.
I hear what she said, but focus on the word “slut”. I haven’t jerked off in four days. I like the idea of her being fucked. I feel sad because I’ll always love her, but horny because I want to be with someone else right now. Someone who is possessed and only wants to play games. Someone life hasn’t raped yet. Eloise is beautiful, it’s true. My computer auto fills her last name as I typed her first name, and it did this because I paused too long on how to describe her. “Beautiful” is bullshit. We have to be more than beautiful right? ok.
“It’s kind of upsetting tbh because this is the guy I always wanted, and you’re not actually mine anymore,” she says.
She stops talking and walks across the room to light a cigarette. The wind is blowing the white curtains around which are catching the sun. The curtain is tucked under the couch, so it’s billowing like a sail. The air is warm and sweet. I hear hybrid cars, making their little ugly hybrid car sounds. Someone is playing basketball. I count four cars parked outside the green craftsman. One is gray, one is red, one is blue. The bottoms of my feet are sweating, and I feel anxious. I have to be somewhere for an appointment at 1pm, I am doing some yard work for money.
Forgive me for insisting on someone with a pure soul who is connected to the ground.
Forgive me for being retarded.