Yeah, I don't know either. -sips coffee-

I don't own Death Note. The lyrics are Silversun Pickups.

boy in static.

/

[winded through monotone.

one foot on checkered floor.

head hung but still watching.

one dimlit figurine.

concealed, pass it on.

appeal, play along.]

/

The funny thing about Matt is that he's dying.

He isn't dying like they do in movies, though. He's not an eight-foot tall face projected in a theater. He's not going down in a split-screen digital display with an orchestral score marking the final swell of life before it burns out. There's no audience. There aren't any cymbols crashing. There isn't any crashing at all.

Matt's a self-declared minimalist, which is a nice way of saying he's not into that shit. The melodrama. The public review. The good-cop bad-cop roleplay that comes with dying. Shit, Matt hasn't watched a movie in years.

(If he had to really think about that philosophy, though, he's pretty sure he'd be the bad-cop, because these things he's been dragging himself through are getting more and more obscene, more fucked up with every crackboompop of a gun.)

This kind of death, the kind he's dying, is a slow disease. You don't even notice it for a good long while. It takes such a long time without any sort of worsening that the only way it could go ignored is if you were your own stranger. If you've never looked in the mirror and seen the bunkers forming beneath your eyes, you wouldn't have a fucking clue that you were dying this steadily, this perfectly. If you've never had to glance down at your hands and feel that sticky, unwashable feel of malfunction, you'd keep going on with your life of cold coffee, spoiled pizza, wiretapping, Mello's eyes. And you'd do it without so much as a shake of your head.

But Matt's feeling it. He's feeling it bad. Right now, standing crookedly beneath the flickering lamp chained to the ceiling, he's getting that crawling suspicion that it's not his organs that are failing, it's his mind. It's that tiger-like intuitiveness that he's always lacked in the first place (that someone else has always had), but there was always something there, something he could grasp and handle and shape up into something usable (that's why he's here in the first place, after all; he's something usable).

What time is it?

That's another thing about dying this kind of death. There aren't days or nights or any of those timelines mapping out schedules and the shifting of the earth; no, with this slow disease, you go press play rewind pause fast forward press play stop. There aren't cycles. There are just cigarettes, holes in your socks, water stains on the ceiling, Mello's eyes.

Time doesn't exist when you're dying like Matt is.

He doesn't think he's even lit the cigarette between his lips. About a hundred heartbeats have passed and there's no smoky ghosts in the room. It dangles and wavers like something useless and guised at the corner of his mouth, bored and waiting to burn.

When you're dying like Matt is, you keep track of time with the thrashing of your pulse and the otiose drift-fade of smoke rings. Because time doesn't exist, but things like pulses and inhallation syndrome do. He guesses.

Growing warm, he plucks at the T-shirt draped over his bones. A cool whiff of air rises up and touches his stomach and chest with spidery hands. Invasive. He reaches up and taps the lamp; in the mirror, he watches it swing and sway like a white-hot harlot above his head. The cigarette in his mouth remains unlit. The cycle remains stunted.

He watches his face go from lit to unlit, light to dark, bright to shadowed, and in that brief space in between when he's neither alive nor dead, Matt smiles like he means it and murmurs, "Shit." He smiles like he fucking means it, so loose and lazy and hot that any angel would lift her skirts for him. He smiles like this, and he's lit up again in the mirror, a limp, sweaty collection of skin and shapes that have taken twenty years to come together in the right order, because Matt's always been a little askew, sort of sloppy, never entirely there.

The lamp flickers violently above. A tinny buzz, like that of a fly caught in the bulb, and it's out. Matt laughs and inhales pretend-smoke; his cigarette is still fresh, a token for blackened lungs. In the dark, he wipes his face with his palm, flicks pretend-ashes onto the floor, and smiles again (like he means it, like it's everything he's got).

It's not so bad, really.

It's not so bad.