#500wordchallenge

I’ve never been much of a writer, I’m not particularly good with words anymore and I feel that my sentence structuring is somewhat awkward and not as delicately put as it could be. Like that. That sentence was ridiculously longer then it probably needed to be. A good writer and someone who had that refinement could probably have written that same sentence in half the amount of words and in a far more poetic or metaphoric way than what I have done. Therefore I am doing this challenge to try and develop my non-existent writing skills and to just challenge myself to do something a bit unconventional and interesting. Who knows I might actually find a writing voice or style that I can use. At the best I might find I really enjoy this and on the flip side it might just be that writing isn’t for me. Either way its an experience and that’s what we’re meant to be doing with our lives right? Finding new experiences and making the most of them. While writing 500 words everyday for a month may not be the most exciting of experiences I still have something to gain from this. So through this challenge I’ll be aiming to write about something new everyday. Whether it be about my own personal experiences or maybe about something more historical, international security based, who knows I’m just making this up as I go anyway. So today, I’ll give you a bit of insight in to myself. 

Essentially I’m just a graduate who’s working part time in a job not related to my field whilst I try to search for a job in my field and coming up with nothing short of rejection. It’s great. I love job hunting. Its as though with every bit of rejection I gain an understanding of just how bloody hard the real world is . How do people do this? Companies want the best but what do you do when you know that you’re mediocre at best? Now I know people always try to tell us otherwise and to think positively but sometimes you have to think realistically and just know that you are this and this is what you are. I know that I’m at best mediocre and I do try to improve myself, this challenge being one way but also through reading the news, reading in general, trying to stay up to date with my field etc. However I find that I’m just too awkward and out of place to be someone exceptional. I’m terrible at interviews I never know how to phrase my experience in a way that isn’t clunky and short and even with psychometric testing I’m average at best. So you know you have to realise where your strengths lie and for me its not in making a good impression on people. Rather I feel like I’m more the type of person who enters a job and learns and picks up new concepts and ideas fairly quickly. I’m dedicated to working and will compromise my social life to be more available for a job. However its getting a job which is eluding me. 

It’s Tuesday morning. I know this because the bread van passes my house every Tuesday morning at 5.20. It’s my alarm clock. I say my house but what I really mean is the lowly one bed studio the Union has put me up in for the last 18 months. Two rooms – a bathroom and an everything else room. I sleep where I eat.

It makes me wonder… what the hell am I doing here?

I follow my rituals. I get up, I walk to the kettle and flick the switch. I walk to the bathroom and take a piss, wash my hands, wash my face – but not my teeth, that happens after the coffee. Sometimes, on a Tuesday, if I’m feeling particularly sprightly I’ll run for some fresh bread that just happens to fall off the back of the van….or get pushed by a man who I’m certain does not have feelings for me in any such romantic way, but does have feelings for me. Maybe just one feeling – familiarity. Maybe I’m part of his morning ritual, something for him to look forward to, to guess about, to wonder about. Something unpredictable in such a predictable hour of the day. Maybe I’m creating stories where there isn’t any.

Anyway, today is not a day for bread. Today is a day for trudging from bed to kettle to toilet to kettle to couch. But I won’t stay here very long, not this morning. I not what one would call a morning person, granted some mornings I am a morning person, and on those mornings I think to myself that maybe I really am a morning person. But then the following morning arrives and I sleep until the last possible minute and remember who I really am. You see it is for this reason that rituals are important to me. I call them rituals because they are far more than routines; they are spiritual and they guide me – they are rituals. Without these rituals I would not be able to sleep until 8.03am every morning and be at my desk by 8.55am. But not on Tuesdays.

On Tuesday morning my bread van is my wake up call. More often than not I trudge, as I have said, from bed to kettle to toilet to kettle to couch. I then get up, get dressed and get out the door. This is not an effort, or a huge endeavour for me. There is only one thing that could get me out of bed at 5.30am on a Tuesday morning – and it’s not bread.

There are days when I miss home more than others. Most of those days are Tuesdays. It’s funny the things you think are important – fancy car, fancy house, fancy garden sprinkler. I had it all, have it all I suppose, just not here with me, and it’s not the want of a fancy car or fancy house or fancy sprinkler that keeps me up at night on those days when I miss home more than others. I don’t miss those things. I really don’t care much about them at all. It’s him. It’s them. It’s my life. These are the things I miss. But really it’s just him. His smell, his key turning in the door at 6.05pm every evening, his rare but beautiful cooking, and the rare but beautiful mess left behind in the kitchen.

He is what gets me out of bed at 5.30am on a Tuesday morning. And whilst my mind drifts back home and to him, I wait on the end of a payphone for someone half a continent away to pick up.

Part 1 of 7 of The Sharpest Lives

Loud music, smoke, and the incessant chatter of drunk girls trying to impress other drunk girls. The sounds of home have never sounded so sweet. It had been a long week, I won't lie. My girlfriend dumped me over a disagreement that should have been small but turned into a disagreement of everything we have ever done. After that my job at a local bookstore fired me because I was doing cocaine in the bathroom. You try selling books to would be writers who spent their entire high school lives jerking off to Hemingway without being high. No girlfriend, no job, and soon to be no apartment. It seems the only thing left to me was my friend Olivia. Everyone called her Oli but I just settled for calling her loud. It was Friday night when Oli called me from the kitchen about a house party down the street. It was Friday night when my life turned upside down and I went willingly down the rabbit hole.

Oli and I stood outside a fairly quaint cottage style house that would have seemed perfect for a woodsy setting if not for the blaring music emanating from inside the walls. I turned to Olivia who was dressed in a rocker-tee and some checkered skirt she pulled from her dirty clothes pile, “So, how did you say you knew these guys?”

She danced a bit on her feet against the cold, rubbing her arms, “I didn't.”

“How do you know these guys?”

“I don't.” She smiled at me, then opened the door.

If it was loud outside it was deafening inside. The pulsing lights and the throng of people throughout the house seemed to suck us in and soon I had lost track of Olivia all together, lost in cascading waves of music and laughter. I disengaged myself as much as I could from the crowd and found myself at a table full of booze and strewn over red solo cups. “Oh, thank god.”

“God ain't here, buddy,” a girl who could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four pulled herself up from the floor, “Only the remnants of blood and stardust.”

“That's, uh.” I struggled to find a response as I poured vodka into a cup, “alright then.”

“Who the fuck are you?” She brushed her tousled black hair from her eyes, staring back at me, her pupils impossibly dilated in the semi light around us.

“Alex. Who the fuck are you?”

“Courtney, I think. Tonight, I'm Courtney.”

“Just tonight?” I asked, taking a sip from the cup in my hands, looking around for an escape route back to Oli. The girl named Courtney for the night seemed offended.

“For as long as it takes me to find another me.”

“Well, it's been a nice chat but I'm having a pretty shitty week. I think I'm going to find my friend out there.”

“Wait!” She grabbed my arm.

I tried to pull away but her strength kept me fast and I winced at the pain of the nails digging through the fabric of my shirt. “What the hell!”

The coffee house was filled with the sound of tittering teenagers, forks scraping on empty pastry plates, and one very sharp expletive.

“Fuck! That's hot.” Jimmy spat and reached for his water glass while his friend across from him cocked his head to check out the ass of a passerby.

“It's coffee, it's supposed to be hot.”

“This is what happened to McDonalds, David. I could sue, we could make thousands!”

“She got third degree burns. She was also a moron. Do you want to be a moron, Jimmy?”

Jimmy, crossed his arms and swished some cold water in his mouth, “Mrl.”

“What's that?”

Jimmy swallowed and pulled a face. “Egh, no.”  

“Thatta boy. So what happened last night? You left with that girl, um, Sarah.”

“Cynthia.”

“Yeah, boob chick.”

Jimmy sighed, taking a cautious sip from his mug before running a hand through his hair. “It went alright. We left the bar to get some room to talk. I thought maybe just getting a bite to eat so we went to that pizza place off 5th.”

“Oh, sexy redhead place.”

“Do you always categorize our restaurants by women?”

“No. Maybe. Hey, you asked if I wanted to get coffee at the place with the brunette!”

“Because you don't remember what it's called any other way!”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you!”

David chuckled into his coffee, shrugging a bit. “Whatever. So what happened next?”

“Right, so we went to the pizza place, everything was going great, I didn't check my phone, she didn't check hers, I told her that thing about how crows bring gifts to people who help them out.”

“Oh, girls love it when you talk about carrion feeders.”

“Well this one did.” Jimmy leaned back in his seat, tapping the table to the tune of the shitty jazz music playing in the lobby. “Anyway, I suggested we go to another bar but she made some lame excuse and left a bit out of the blue.”

“Did she say why?”

“Something about having to get to bed early because she had to meet a friend.”

“Well, maybe she really had to meet her friend?”

“Is that a thing? I don't give a shit about meeting you. It just kind of happens sometimes.”

“Maybe she just likes sticking to a schedule. Did you get her number?”

“Yeah, but she did this thing where she grabbed my phone and just put it in.”

David grimaced, “Like she owned it.”

“Yeah! Isn't that like a relationship thing? That's my property! Write it on a slip of paper or ask like a human being.”

“You could have had incriminating evidence on there about what a dick you are.”

“Exactly.”

The pair both took a sip at once, taking a moment of silence to readjust the conversation.

“So. You going to call her?” David asked.

“Do people call anymore? Should I do that? I was just going to text her about going out this Friday.”

“Depends. Do you really like this girl? Does she merit voice-to-voice communication?”

“She did have a way about her...”

“So fucking go for it. Call her right now. Girls love it when a guy looks interested.”

Smoke and fire filled the air, mixing into the lungs of scrambling boys as they pulled themselves over the trenches and ran across the beaten earth. Explosions rang in their ears and tremors shook the ground with each shell that fell from the sky above. A boy, lagging behind the others tripped and fell, grit and blood filling his mouth. Another turned to run back to him, “Oliver!”

Oliver gripped the grass and pulled himself up to his knees, wincing at the pain shooting through his ankle. “Fuck! Danny, my ankle.”

Danny pulled him up, pulling Oliver's arm over his shoulder and hobbling toward the rest of the boys who had jumped down into a bunker lit by a pulsing blue beacon around the edges. “We're almost there Oli, c'mon!”

The duo half ran half stumbled to the opening of the bunker, about 3 feet of room above the ground as the rest of the group urged them on. They jumped and skidded below the opening, sliding into the bunker right before it turned and shut itself, trapping the group underground, the echoes of explosions racking the barrier above them.

“Holy shit, that was close.” A boy in the back leaned back against the wall in a sitting position, wiping his long black air out of his bloody face, “That was only phase 3?”

“A hell of a lot better than the forest if you ask me. At least we could see where we were going this time,” Oliver answered.

There were six boys left of the twenty that started ranging from the ages of fourteen to seventeen. Covered in blood, sweat, and sulfur, they had been driven to an island and kicked off a boat only to be left there with a single sign that said Phase 1 Begins Make Your Way To The Checkpoint.

Oliver took a survey of the bunker they were holed up in as Danny worked on asking around for a crutch so he wouldn't have to put weight on his ankle. The walls were solid with no markings or indication of any other previous occupants before them. The boy leaning against the wall spoke up, “How many do you think are left?”

Oliver shook his head, “Could be one more. Could be ten. Does anyone remember The Legion giving us a number?” He only got shaking heads in answer. “Hell of a training session.”

“They're weeding out the weak among us. No place for weakness in The Legion.”

Danny came back, shaking his head, “You'll just have to lean on me to get past this, Oli.”

A voice chimed out from the other end of the room, “We have to leave him, Dan.”

Danny turned around angrily, putting himself between Oliver and the room, “Go fuck yourself Reid, we can't just leave him.”

“He's not my friend, asshole. I want to make it out of here alive. Remember Richard? We left him to get eaten by a fucking dog made of fire and I knew him a hell of a lot better than I know either of you. But we did what we had to do.”

“Fine, if you want to run ahead and die without any friends that's your problem but I'd rather-”

“Shut up! The shells stopped.” Oliver gripped the walls to help himself get up as the bunker shook and started to descend into the ground.

“The hell...it's an elevator?”

The bunker came to a stop and the walls fell outward revealing an underground cavern filled with jagged crystals, giving off a blue glow. Feral shrieks sounded from the distance and soon the cavern echoed with the sound of wings.

Danny turned to Oliver as the other boys started running. “No blood, no glory.”