Welp

Helloooooooo. Since my artblog has been consistently made up of these two characters and their different iterations for over a year now I thought it’s time I made some sort of quick rundown. If you’re new to this blog and curious feel free to check this out. 👁👁

The Last Summer

I don’t know what it was. I got up from the couch, standing in place like the wind would take me down, weak at the knees and locking them tight. I was going to be sick—heartsick, not any kind of sick I could describe. Suddenly it was all too much. Suddenly I had no idea what the fuck I was doing; I was a scarecrow lurking in the living room of Nacho’s trailer, almost banging my head on the doorframe while the pitbull’s tail whipped the backs of my legs, forcing his cold, wet nose into the palm of my hand.

My ears popped. All that was left was the depressurization, drifting low down, knowing that out there in the dark a rookie was getting sucked up in the fans again—I should have checked, but my mind was on some argument over breakfast. It should’ve been me. I pulled trash bag coffins out of the river for a living.

‘Troy—¿qué pasa?’ I was too dizzy to realize. In the span of a blink I was looking down at Nacho with the thousand-yard stare of the century, waves of black pounding at the shores of my vision, too hot to breathe, losing time again.

‘I don’t feel good,' was all I could manage. My face was numb and I tried to time my breathing , but it wasn't working. He was there, though, like a pillar in the rubble, and I let myself sink like the sun into his shoulder in the strangest embrace. I squeezed him like I would evaporate if I didn’t. Soundless breaths came where frustrated sobs should've been, but I forgot how to do that.

The worst part of it was that he squeezed me back, patting me awake through a string of hushed whispers in various languages—whichever he thought would get through to me, maybe—while the damp breeze of the swamp cooler flashed over me, soaking my back and shirt. He fanned my neck. I tasted metal and waited for my heart to explode.

I fought it, but it won.

‘Troy—Troy you blacked out. You with me? Easy, easy.’ He murmured, when I came back again, on the floor this time. It hurt. “Talk to me, tell me.’

‘I hate this.’ I groaned, like my voice was soggy concrete. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. He smelled good, a strange mix of his deodorant and mig gas and the dirt, burnt rubber and leather and something I couldn't describe. He smelled like a home that wasn’t mine, that I could only press my hands to the glass of and watch. I pushed myself away—disgusted, nauseated. Being rocked, being held—they were innocent things I'd seen warped into transactions, with bitter, hollow touches. It was fucking revolting.

'I don't want to be here.'

He’s my friend, I know he’s...

I’m making a scene.

‘Okay, okay,’ Nacho got up with me, gripping my elbows. ‘Fine, we won’t stay in here, okay? Let’s go outside, ven, ven—outside.’

I was nodding along—whatever, sure—and he ushered me out the linoleum door, the dog barreling past my thigh and into the vast expanse of desert after a jackrabbit. Nacho led me down the faded, chipped porch steps onto the land countless generations before him walked, past the brush and old tires and rusted frames and headlights, tugging my hair so my ragdoll head set my gaze skyward. The flash of dim sunlight blinded me and prickled my sinuses.

‘Look up, Troy,” he told me, pointing overhead. “Look at the sky. Breathe. Look up. Just look.’

The cool, dry wind blasted my face and filled my clothes, leaving goosebumps where sweat bathed me in a tacky film, the sky bleeding a thousand hues of pink and orange. The Sierras rippled out before me, grandparents—slow, quiet, and eternal. I thought the dirt smelled like cat piss when I first got here, but it was rain and soil, filling my nose and eyes with dust. I blinked through it; I liked the sting. It was the smell of the earth. The smell of life.

It was a lot like the ocean.

Nacho’s weathered, chapped palm slapped down on my back, several pats to bring me back, just hard enough to recalibrate my lungs. Unlike all the other times, they turned gentle, lingered, but his fingertips were cautious. I felt the shaking stop. The crying and screaming and frenzy and fear and desperation to save a life at all cost faded. My perception cleared with a bizarre sense of confusion coming and going as the dog rummaged through the crunchy grass without a care in the world. His voice came and went too, like a song.

‘You ok? Better? Better, huh? Take a minute.’ I could only muster an apology, which I don’t think he wanted. Of course he didn’t. He disappeared while I kept my eyes on the clouds, lowering to a squat. When he returned it was with a lawn chair, which I declined—no, you sit, I’m fine—but he insisted.

He was right. It was comfortable.

I wanted to tell him: I felt like I’d been there before. He was younger than me, but had a lifetime to watch the sky and the mountains and the fields of corn, to learn how to soothe himself with few words, tender as they may be, from a mother and father and endless grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins all present and wordless themselves in a place where silence was sweeter. I was 36-years-old, an outsider, with a child’s understanding of shit he learned day 1. Things my own grandparents tried to instill in me, with glossy eyes scarred and numb from war, feeling like the whole world forgot about them.

Nacho was trying to teach me something; the least I could do was listen.

It took him a while to find beauty in a sunset, he said, because for him it meant no rain, and their crops would fail. An old habit, but it was their way. I persuaded him, he said, and got him to come around, to think of it like art instead.

Me, of all people. It was hard to believe.

In my incredulousness I laid my head back again, let my dusty socks prop in the grass, while he never minded going barefoot in this. That’s just how it was done. The guy owned more shoes than a department store, but still his toes were in the dirt, the ragged hems of his jeans cuffed, leaning over to hand me a cold pop. The sugar would do me some good, he said.

Root beer, my favorite.

He knew that. Of course he did.

I knew he liked tamarind and chili in his ice cream, like a lunatic—acid and heat, cooled by sweetness, a whirlwind of shit he called a romance. I knew he liked the bellow of an engine and the gasoline high. I knew he was afraid of what his anger inspired. I knew it took a good heart to fear it.

I felt like I’d known him my entire life; I wished I had. How different would this shit-show be if I knew him and his voice he was diminished for, since singing in his language isn't a thing men do, but he does it anyway. I knew his minor chords, they raised me. Others found it sad, haunting—she always did—but for me, it was warm. It was rebellion. It was home.

again maybe Nacho just runs away cuz he thinks for maybe 8 seconds Robert Smith has manifested in his audience & is hearing his covers

Nacho: "😏 Do I?"