The Monster

Such a profound loneliness, he thought to himself.

His eyes darted across the landscape; a luscious scene stretched out before him. Thick, wet grass poked up from the earth below, warm and long. For miles it ran, leaving no patch of soil unfurnished. Directly above it, an expansive baby blue sky unraveled, reaching beyond the heavens themselves. Wisps of clouds, like cotton candy, powdered the sky while the occasional black speck that was a bird darted through them. Nearby, magnificent trees, thick and brown with age, extended their arms, branches tickling the sky. Leaves that had shed from neighboring trees littered the earth, giving the world a freckled appearance. As the season of fall began to creep up on this half of the world, eating away at the final days of summer, it brought along a cool breeze that ruffled through his hair and lightly burned his eyes. 

In between heaven and hell, he sat.  

He relit the cigarette that had remained untouched between his fingers for several minutes, brought it to his lips, and inhaled deep and long. With every puff of exhausted smoke, a slight bit of tension escaped. But then he blinked. And his mind, like the scratched reel of a movie film, skipped over the last few years of his existence, and the tension reappeared; a sharp pain in his head, situated directly behind his eyes. Annoyance mostly, but also tension.

He was strong, unyielding, thoroughly and laboriously molded into the man he was today. The self-discipline that he so diligently prided himself on was mistook by many for outright arrogance; and so they hated him.

Many people hated him. But he could care less.

Drumming his skinny fingers on the wooden picnic table beneath his hand, he sighed; it sounded more like an exasperated moan. She had always irritated him about that; about his unusual hybrid of emotions. About how one could never tell them apart, or see them at all. She would sit beside him on their soft, velvet couch, the television humming in the background, and sift her pale fingers through his coarse hair. In the beginning it excited and warmed him; such an angelic girl, such a beautiful face, only inches away from his own. But as the months went by, her face grew more and more customary. The soft touch on his scalp began to itch and the humming of the television grew louder and louder until it reverberated off his brain, ringing in his ears.  And the soft, velvet sofa sagged beneath the weight of their hatred towards one another.

After that, he went through them like water; women. Not prostitutes, never the prostitutes he would see crossing the street near East Detroit. Got more class than that, he muttered beneath his breath and took another drag from his cigarette. They were always the girls he had already known – from work, from class. It was not unusual for him to end up sleeping with one of the young beauties Nick introduced him too on a Friday night. It never took too much effort to have her.  A smile from him. A phone number from her. A short exchange in the form of a phone call. And in a matter of days, it would be over.

And he was alone again. Such a profound loneliness.

He finished his cigarette and flicked it into the grass. The shining sun overhead continued to pound down upon him and it was then he noticed that it was no longer pleasantly cool; that the cold running down his back was sweat and not a breeze. He scratched an itch on his forehead and gazed back up at the sun. The already small, black pupils in his eyes narrowed further, but his brilliant green eyes continued to soak up the shine. He had been in hotter places before this.

The inner eye of his mind skipped back to the day he had first seen her, seated across from him in a lecture hall. She was oblivious of his existence and never spoke to him, but he watched her; watched her twirl the thin strand of hair that had come loose from her ponytail with a slender finger. Watched her body rise and fall with every hot breath that passed through her and imagined what it would feel like on the back of his neck. Watched her eyelids flutter when she blinked and gazed straight past him, unseeing. But he wanted her immediately, and vowed silently that he would have her. And he did.

Several months later, she lay beside him, naked on his bed, sweetly humming a pleasant tune he had not heard before and gently pressing her lips against his. Her enormous black irises frightened him; he had only ever seen such an ink black in the dead eyes of a fish he once ate. But her eyes were not dead, they were alive with laughter and a magic of youth he had never seen before in person. Her diamond shaped face hosted every feature well, from a perfectly sculpted nose to naturally arched eyebrows that never seemed out of shape. She turned over to find sleep and the tingling scent of something foreign exuberated from her dark hair and tickled his nostrils. He leaned in closer to enjoy her scent and tenderly touched the tip of his nose against her warm, smooth skin and watched as she glowed unusually in the dim-lit setting. His hand quickly replaced his nose and he pulled her close to him, not wanting her to leave.

He wanted her so desperately, in more than simply a lustful way. He wanted every part of her to hold him, to love him, her body, her mind and her spirit. But she had seen the terror in his eyes and the destruction in his soul. She had seen it thinking that it was his worst; that she could help him through it – but he assured her that this was not the case. The terror, the destruction, the anger and confusion that he so desperately clung too, that was all him at his best. He had nothing more.

So I must leave, she told him in the morning, you have nothing to offer. And so she slowly, sensually got dressed and walked out of the room, without a single glance back in his direction. He stared behind her at the door she had so selfishly left open, like the gaping wound that was his heart. Something growled and awakened inside of him, a never before felt, strange burst of hybrid emotion. It stung furiously.

He felt it then, and he felt it now, sitting amongst the grass and the trees and the skies. Jealousy, he had always known, was the worst characteristic a man could ever possess. It turned one wild with anger and red with hatred until every pore on their body emitted a heat so strong and so sharp, it stung not only him, but friends, family, and passerby’s, keeping them all far away. Discipline against jealousy and pain was what had been engraved in him for years, since before he was a young man. But as his resolve weakened, and that wall of training crumbled, and as those emotions flooded throughout his body, he felt unsure and alone.

Such a profound loneliness.