Title: Mark has a Place
Rating: G
Summary: he's detached from himself like a badly stringed puppet - a hexadrabble -
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Mark has a place of his own. He sits and stares at a concrete wall, numb from silence and a lack of thought. The grime settles deep into his gut, a feeling that isn't as dirty as one might expect. It's a small place, enclosed in such a way to give the illusion of warmth, though he never really feels it. Some days he wonders why nobody else has found the safe place, but can only assume that the local homeless have seen him claim it as his own.
Some days he thinks about the sight he must make, too-clean blond hair against red-white graffiti. Most days he doesn't think at all. Maybe he'd analyse this strange little hobby of his, if he were that kind of person. But he's not. So he sits, and stares at nothing at all while raindrops echo, or shadows whisper. He doesn't have a logic for this place.
Sometimes he smile-twitches at the cracks in the pavement, in his knuckles, in his hand. Reflex. A learned behaviour. A habit. He thinks that maybe that's pathetic in some way, or maybe it's just realistic. He wonders if he's the only one who has his own little cramped corner of the world to hide in. He wonders if he's the only one who needs one.
Sometimes he dreams. Echoes of past conversations, shifting, smearing, striking faces, a shadow of what might have once been an emotion. Anger? Fear? Despair?Grief?Bleak?Dark?Hurt?Love? He wishes he knew the labels that come so easily to other people.
He thinks he knows who he loves, if he should love anyone. If he could love anyone. And he knows he should be sad?lonely?scared? now, because that person is gone from his reach. But he really isn't. At least, not here, in this numb, empty place.
Roger is getting married. Two months he said and won't it be great, Mark? Mimi's parents are even lending us some money for the wedding, and then he's moving out, away from someone who never needed him, the ex-junkie ex-rockstar ex-victim ex-best friend. Not that they'd ever labelled themselves as such.
And Mark should be, should be, something, something out of a romance novel or a bad piece of fiction, but he's not, he's just some emotion he can't quite define that he's not sure exists anyways. Like the word is on the edge of his tongue and all it would take is an odd movement and something unknown and new would come ripping into consciousness.
He's detached from himself like a badly stringed puppet, and sometimes he wishes he could just stop, but it's ingrained in him (reflexlearnedbehaviorhabit) so deeply he imagines he has hollow bones. So he thinks he should smirk when he catches sight of one sticky hand clutching his camera. When he tries to break the hold it's like bending stone. He stops trying. He can't fight against who he is.
Mark has a place of his own. It's cold and damp or hot and dry and never comfortable. It's gummy tar and tarry gum and dirt and dark and dead. He sits there for however long it takes for the almost-silence to sink into his center and the grime to coat his fingertips. He doesn't analyse his reasons for coming here, but he always finds it a little bit easier to smilelaughteaseruneatsleepplay afterwards.
Sometimes he wonders if he's as cracked as his chapped white-red palms, but the thought always wisps away before it is ever truly formed.