DESPAIR

Reds and blues and yellows drifted across the cab windows, filtering in and out of Jack’s vision like splotches of paint on an empty canvas. It had been weeks since the show, longer still since he and Dane had figured out their poodoo in this latest round of jam-your-trauma-edges together.

And life, well, life had a way of fading in and out of focus. One minute everything was acute, a crisis. Then, for days, it blended together in a soup of gigs, odd jobs, recording studios, prep for community Christmas parties and Sunday morning coffees on a ratty sofa and light-hearted arguments about whether to cut vegetables.

Then, before you knew it, you were here: in the back of a cab, speeding back to your crappy apartment in the middle of the night, your partner sprawled in the back seat with you with his eyes set hazily on the pavement and your eardrums muffled by the loud bass of a party you'd already left.

“I don’t know why I’m so exhausted,” Jack said, watching red drift into blue; the back of his head tickled with the sensation of a thousand lives whizzing past, hidden behind old brownstones. New York’s blood pressure was up, he thought distantly. ( A moment in liminal space. )

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