Slow Town - Twenty One Pilots
They ran back from the aquarium to Dan's house in a mad dash, even though no one was chasing them. Sometimes Dan felt like that was the best way to go about things. And Phil always thought that was the best way to go about things.
And of course, even though it was summer in New York, it started raining.
It rarely rained where they were in the summers. Especially in June. They got the classic New York rainfall in April, but it was always dry as hell in June.
But of course it started raining, and Dan wasn't sure that it wasn't coming from Phil's power of loving cliches.
Phil twirled in a circle and looked at Dan, his features barely readable in the darkness, even though they were only separated by a few feet of space. Phil reached his hand out, Dan instantly responding, lifting his arm towards Phil. It was like a magnetic pull, he didn't even have to think about it. Dan just gravitated closer to Phil, always. Phil used this to his advantage.
He pulled Dan in and kissed him, his hand firmly on Dan's lower back.
"You're so great." Phil whispered, smiling giddily, his eyes closed. Everything that he did, he did it with giddy.
Dan just blushed and moved away, walking forward.
"I don't know why you think so. No one else seems to share you opinion." He didn't say it with self hatred or embarrassment, Phil knew this, he just said it because he was always amazed at how amazing Phil seemed to find him.
"Well they should." Phil skipped to catch up. "You're the coolest person I know. You always beat me at Crash Bandicoot, you take great pictures, you know how to dance, you say interesting things. And you're way hotter than any of the other guys around here, that too."
Dan chuckled. They'd had this discourse before. Where Dan thought he was ordinary, and Phil thought he was extraordinary.
"Not counting you" Dan added.
"Of course, not counting me." Phil said sarcastically, sticking his hands in his pockets and walking beside Dan with a jump in his step. Sometimes he seemed manic, just in the way that he moved and walked and talked. It was part of his charm, though. That stupid charm that Dan could never resist.
They walked like that through the woods behind the aquarium, rain now pouring from the sky, until they were sopping wet and had almost reached the end of the forest, which was only a block away from Dan and Phil's neighborhood.
Dan shot a side glance at Phil, catching him trying to push his fringe into place and miserably failing. And all he could think was how tragic it was that no matter what the situation was, Dan would always think Phil looked perfect.
He could be crying with puffy eyes and a red nose and he'd still look perfect.
He could be frowning and annoyed and bitch and he'd still look perfect.
He could be waiting in the rain for two days, his hair a mess, soaked to the bone, and he'd still look perfect.
The tragic part wasn't even that he looked perfect in those situations. He didn't look perfect in those situations. That was the tragic part. It was that even when he didn't look perfect, Dan thought he did.
And what was even more deplorably tragic was that the first thing that came to Dan's mind when he thought of this tragic situation was that Phil could easily turn it into the poem of a desired situation.
Dan thought back to a time when they had both recently turned sixteen and Phil had shown up in Dan's bedroom window, knocking on it as if there were no parents to accidentally wake up.
Dan, in a frenzy, had opened it and rushed them both out the front door so that they wouldn't wake his family.
At first, when Phil started talking, he was just really confused. Then Phil mentioned that he'd stolen pot from Dan's childhood friend, Chris. He went through a phase where he sold pot in the park for low prices, but he was really bad at it. He gave up on that after three months.
But Phil had already taken some without paying and had smoked it and was now standing in Dan's driveway, stoned as fuck and sixteen.
Not a lot of what he was saying was very put together, since Phil had always been someone to get off their face way too easy and had weird reactions to that shit, too.
He just kept quoting Beat Generation authors.
For example, he'd said "But its October and getting much colder in the nights" quoting Jack Kerouac's On The Road. And then also Allen Ginsberg with "I saw the best minds of my generations destroyed by madness".
Dan just kept trying to interject with the fact that it wasn't October but Phil just shushed him and quoted Jack Kerouac again "My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them"
It was rather confusing for both of them, but Dan just let Phil crash at his house after they walked around the neighborhood until he'd at least partially sobered up.
So they ended up in Dan's bedroom at two AM and Phil was just crying and freaking out, saying that the government was against them all, and that he was stupid and wouldn't amount to anything. Two very unrelated things, but it was what it was.
Dan kept telling Phil that he was perfect and he wasn't stupid and that he would be successful and have a great life, but nothing was working. So of course, then Dan started crying because it was what he did best. Even was if wasn't high, he was just a cry baby.
The only thing he could think to do that calmed them both down was playing music on his record player. Yes, a real record player from the sixties. His mom had kept it around from her childhood. The only record she had was of Elvis's. Blue Hawaii.
So Dan just put it to a random song and laid down on his bed next to Phil, both of them in hysterics.
With the soft melodies of the song Blue Hawaii (which happened to be the first song on the album "Blue Hawaii", what a surprise), they quieted down. But after the song faded to nothing and Dan stopped the record player, Phil was still in a weird mood.
They stayed up the rest of the night, talking about all the deep shit they could think of.
Dan laid his head on Phil's chest, staring up at the ceiling with Phil twirling his messy curls around his fingers.
And Phil kept using the quote "You don't have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking". Dan wasn't sure where it was from, other than that it came from the beat generation. He was sure, in that night, that Phil would have made a horrible Beatnik.
Because Phil loved to play pretend.
When they were young, Phil would come up with games where they were pirates, or pilots, or (one time) patients in an insane asylum. Most of the time it was what all kids did at that age.
But Phil never grew out of it. He still played pretend everyday. He pretended like things didn't bother him. Like he didn't care. Like it didn't matter to him that he thought he didn't matter. Dan knew otherwise.
Dan knew that he cared a lot. A lot more than most people. Phil cared intensely about how things would turn out for him. How things would turn out for Dan, too.
Dan always pegged himself as the cry baby. The over thinker. The boy who worried. That was even his fathers nickname for him when he was little. "The boy who worries". But the truth was, Phil was like that two. He just preferred to pretend than to actually deal with it.
Not that what Dan was doing could qualify as "dealing with it". No, what Dan did was more like "suffering with it" than "dealing with it". He still preferred it to pretending, though. Not the he'd ever been any good at pretending, either.
Phil was very good at pretending.
He had the whole town tricked into thinking that he didn't care.
He had the whole town tricked into thinking that he didn't feel that much.
He had the whole town tricked into thinking that he did cry just as much as Dan.
He cried just as much as Dan. He just cried in private.
God fucking damnit. They're a bunch of nihilists, aren't they?
~~~
"Hey, Phil?" Dan rolled over onto his stomach, reaching his hand across the bed to see if Phil was there without actually having to open his eyes.
No one.
But there was a warm spot on the bed where he'd been.
Dan sat up slowly and breathed in. Yup, the window was open. He could smell the flowers that he mother re-planted every month because Phil kept knocking them over in the middle of the night.
Dan wasn't disappointed. He figured that Phil would leave in the night. Mr and Ms Howell were getting home early in the morning and probably wouldn't want to see their son in bed with the gay best friend. Not the best way to kick off the summer.
He stood up and stumbled to his desk, opening the top drawer. It was almost a reflex - he didn't even have to remember seeing Phil slip the note in there the day prior to know that there was probably one in there.
He used a whole piece of paper to write something in small hand writing in the bottom corner. He knew that always annoyed Dan.
"You know, there was this one book a read where this poet said something along the lines of 'A sure-fire way to experience happiness is reliving that of which others have felt happiness for. Re-discover their adventures. Re-write their poems.'
Well fuck that shit. Lets get up and write our own poems, Daniel Howell."
He chuckled. Phil always knew how to make things exhilarating. He could take a normal summer and twist it and turn it and paint it and mold it until it became the best three months of your life. He could take a regular poem and scuff it up and toss it around and bend it until it was something beautiful. He could take a boring quote and move it around and spin it and churn it until it meant something powerful.
He could take a person who has nothing special about them really and talk to them and fill them with words and emotions and tears until they become someone like Dan, who's heart was always on the brink of over flowing. It as funny how he could just do that like it was nothing. And then he thought he was nothing special.
Phil was very wrong, according to Dan. He was everything special. He was everything right in the world. He kept everything balanced.
And he was everything special.