#incompletes

Send me good vibes so I can finish one of my incompletes today.

God knows I need it

Every morning for breakfast Fiona had eggs and toast. It was Scott’s favorite thing to watch: Fiona in a long t-shirt and bleary eyes turning on the Keurig, twisting open the old gas stovetop, cracking two eggs without looking, turning blindly to the toaster, popping in the bread, outstretching her arm to grab the coffee, then flipping the eggs with perfect precision. She scraped jelly over the dry surface of the toast, licked the knife, then used it to scrape her finished eggs onto the plate. Exquisitely rehearsed. Fiona was a creature of habit, and of comfort--she thrived on choreography. 

She kept her hair in a low, loose ponytail, a knot of fine black threads plunging and unraveling across her back, hugging her shoulder blades in a dark embrace. Her eyes were the color of a roasted hazelnut, her skin the color of its shell, emblazoned with freckles. He’d sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her as she watched TV, and count every last one. 44 on her cheeks, 19 on her nose, and one on each eyelid that he counted over and over again as her eyes thickened with wine and she nodded off to sleep cocooned in fleece on the couch. 

Scott liked being alone, but he didn’t care for being lonely. He didn’t live, but he got by as best he could. Fiona was lonely too, anyone could see, but not lonely like the old man who preceded her, or the trodden-upon housewife before him. No, Fiona was young--the child of a digital age, a culture of connectivity. The isolation of old age or an empty life is circumstantial, a raw deal or an inevitability. Fiona chose her fate. Fiona was less alive at 25 than the old man had been at 85. Living off her parents’ inheritance and watching the world flash by her through dated curtains, that’s not quite living.  

He talked to her a lot, asked her about her day, enthused about her favorite shows, he told her everything about his childhood, the places he’d seen, his favorite bands. It was nice to have someone to talk to, even if she never heard. It was just nice to talk. Sometimes he would reach out and touch the back of her neck, so lightly he couldn’t even feel the grains of his fingertip against her skin, and she’d shiver suddenly, gooseflesh darting in a cold ripple up her arms and back. It was satisfying, to make her feel something. 

And now here he was, pacing on her front stoop, wondering for the first time in his life what she was doing. Making tea, maybe. Fiona drank wine when she had something to pacify, but tea when there was something that needed to be dusted off and awakened. He thought about her at the breakfast table, stirring her tea distractedly, the tinny clink of the spoon circuiting her faded mug, ticking a sober staccato. Was she thinking about him? Was she smiling? Scott bounced up and down the stone steps gleefully, because he didn’t know, because it felt good not to know, and because god, it was just nice to talk.