A Lovely Evening

Fluorescent lamplight shines through a magic window, a spotlight on a chubby, acne-splotched eighteen-year-old overdue for a haircut again. Over the past few hours, the dark basement has become a battleground. His weapons are the keys, a flurry of indistinguishable clicks under his already experienced fingers. His provisions are will and drive alone. 

He is guided by an unquenchable thirst for something special and extraordinary, to blot out the stains left on him by others with no outlet for their hate. This is his outlet, but not for darkness alone. Triumph speckles the tragedy he writes, little snippets of sunlight to keep readers from fading to black. Dangling threads of mystery hang from the body of the story that one just wants to pull.  Somewhere inside, he wonders if its actually any good, the seeds of doubt sown deep by angry hands and hurtful words. Somewhere else inside, a voice rages louder- 

"Keep going! You're finally coming to the end, after how many years?"

"Ten," another answers, quieter. All the while, others who live inside him, each with their own families, upbringings, and sadly charming idiosyncrasies hold their own duel in his laptop. The hero, to him, is on the other side of the screen, zipping back and forth across an electronic page in a struggle of whits with his book-long nemesis. 

"I have to finish this tonight," the grungy teen mutters, hardly in control. The story has him now. It always has, but in these twilight hours, the barrier between them melts away. 

The characters in his screen swirl in his head as each stage in their development and the sum of their thousands of parts all at once. It's an overwhelming, fatigue stimulated rush of inspiration strong enough even to muffle the voice of his mother questioning what he was going to do with his life? Even the echo of his own doubt falls into the background; how could he deal with his potential lack of validity as a writer when the hero was about to succumb to his forbidden power to save his only friends? 

It didn't matter that he was sinking into a thirty year old couch under the worn wooden rafters of my mom's basement. It didn't matter that he didn't have a penny of saving to my name or a job, health insurance, or a plan for college. Maybe he'd be a teacher- he was good with kids- but it was time to finish the fight. He'd taken up the pen ten years ago, crying on the staircase when the sword had struck him down. He wasn't that victimized weeping meatball now, he was the one in control, weaver of worlds. Someday, everyone would see it, and they'd all shut up about his weight and his hair. The final key snapped down. Fin, he typed, for lack of energy to come up with anything else. The sun's first faint breath had climbed halfway up the cold concrete walls. 

"Merry Christmas, Justin," he said to himself.