'How does someone accomplish appearing unbothered by catastrophe? How does one superimpose a way of being, of acting, onto a life that's slowly crumbling. Is it acting if you're not doing it on purpose? If it just kinda happens? Am I lying if I don't face the truth?' 

Josh sat in the Longford jail room alone, running his finger along the cold wood of the arm rest. He passed time counting ridges and bumps like braille, reading their past occupants through eyes blinded by the fact time passes away.

"Josh, Josh come on get up," Jack crosses his arms, his white coat draped like a cape over his shoulders. Always the scrapbook hero, always the middle school savior, always the lifelong winner. Josh never had a chance at greatness and he knew it. And here he was stuck as the one who lost again. 

He realizes Jack must have left from the hospital night shift to get him.  His brother towers above him, staring disapprovingly, a bright green thermos tucked under his arm and black circles painted under his eyes. His words are sharp and clipped as he picks Josh up by the arm off the wooden bench and drags him toward the door, "What were you thinking? You thought they wouldn't arrest you?"

"Let me explain Jack geeze-" Josh splutters as the long scarf which he'd wrapped around his neck constricts like a snake. He'd been laying down, watching police officers pace the halls and swap theories like they swapped manilla folders and gambling debts. The nail on the bench had pressed a small circle onto his cheek which was already red from tears.

"Oh Josh, believe me there is no explanation in the world for this one," Jack swivels on his heels back to face him, "Do you have any idea what Dad would say, Mom would kill you. And then she'd kill me, and then she would pick a fight with the planet for all exigent circumstances that led to this."

"I had to check, I had to see if there was something the police missed."

The grey mortar of the police station walls open up to a large main entrance. It was here assistants texted with pattering thumbs like rain on an awning and phones rang from every desk and corridor. The two race down the stairs foot after foot, Josh avoiding touching the railing at all costs and sanitizing his hands afterwards anyway.

"Missing? No. Listen. There was an investigation, and what did they say about it? They said it's closed. You know what closed means don't you? You can't just break into her apartment, you don't have a key anymore, she isn't your girlfriend. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we can start coping. I get it okay, she was my friend too you know? But you can't just..."

Josh turns up the collar of his scratchy pitch black coat and drags his untied sneakers across the weathered floor.

He isn't listening anymore.

"Look we all grieve in different ways" Jack jogs to keep up, "Why don't you take up swimming or something, the town pools heated."

"Yeah, heated by the sun. Which means it's like the arctic, and second of all, I'm not grieving. And no, that's not denial, it's just the assortment of facts. And- she wasn't my girlfriend, she wasn't my anything after February third. So maybe stick your nose into the things you actually have a degree in and don't superimpose your opinions on my life and morality."

"You're infuriating lately. Is this because I made you go to sleep early last week?" Jack stopped and opened the door for him, "You can't stay up for thirty six hours, you're going to kill yourself."

"No. Though if you want me to feel better (Which i'm feeling fine, completely fine for your information) the sooner you move out the happier i'll be, now adios, adeverchie, sayonara sriracha or however they say it," Josh took a sharp left turn and the wind whipped a bit sticking up his hair in long thin strands. The skyscrapers framed the street, like piercing needles reaching up to the clouds. Josh thought rather morbidly that he would have been better off born a skyscraper with a purpose than a man with little to live for at all. He walked so fast that Jack eventually gave up following. He stood and watched Josh kick a can off the curb and shove his hands into his coat pockets. What more could he do? Josh had given up hope in a lot of things lately, including him. 

------------------------------

Josh woke up around ten the next morning, his limbs sore and eyes clouded. One sharp breath, in and out, and all the memories come crashing back. He remembers very little of her, of anything before last week. He was happy, wasn't he? Was he? Or was it just in comparison to how he was feeling now. A powerful nostalgia that clouds makes it hard to discern how he really feels. But there is a heaviness that sits atop his chest that makes his fingers clench the bedcovers.

For the first night in nineteen years he had gotten up, stared at the dull orange of the side lamp and turned it off. He slept in complete darkness, and fell asleep within seconds of his head hitting the mattress.

He doesn't bother to tie the frayed strings on his plaid blue pajama pants. Daily apparel consists of these and a grey T-Shirt, occasionally a bathrobe or coat. He gets up after an hour and makes himself coffee, the creamer foaming like an island amidst the bitter dark liquid. Isolated and strangely shaped it spins and froths. He never buys bowls now, they seem impractical.

 If he dies it'll be an item hard to sell in the estate sale. 

So he keeps tall travel cups all stacked sideways and wobbling in a cabinet above the stove, ready for a getaway. He puts in his cereal and milk and stirs it with the spoon, the metal clanking like a car against a rumble strip. The table is clear, but the sink is filled with plates and cups, the smell of rotten ketchup and dairy products are a tattooed aroma to their surfaces. He lays out the plate, folds the napkin, and then neglects eating all together for a different activity.

Josh runs his hand along the silver picture frame, wiping the thin layer of dust from around its edges. He isn't sure how to react, if he should be smiling as he is in the picture, or if he is supposed to feel something more than a stomach ache.

'People usually do right?' he thinks with a frown as he grabs a cardboard box and starts pulling pictures from the wall. 'Jack says so. Usually they sob for a couple months, their coworkers send cheap cards, the tissue companies get a little extra for this quarter, and then everybody moves on and never looks back.'

He sits on the couch and drums his fingers on his leg, biting the inside of his cheek. The mail is left in a large unopened pile, a vertical filing cabinet of assorted sizes and fonts all on the verge of toppling off the footstool. He throws his blurred reflection on the TV and thinks about whether perhaps he can buy one of those things to hang it on the wall. If he could borrow a leveler from Jack. 

After all if there's one thing Jack's always talking about its balance.

And then without meaning to-

45^2

66%

87x43

'Boredom,' he thinks scrunching his eyes tightly closed, and doesn't think of it twice.

The apartment is small, a living room separated from the kitchen only by an island in a long L that connects to the sink and cabinets. There's a wooden coffee table with glass across the top, a leather sofa and armchair adjacent. It's bright out and the glass keeps catching the light, making it daylight in the room even with the blinds closed tightly.

He peeks outside the window and wonders- 35mph, 36mph, 40mph-

The box is closed and set into the closet.

He sits on the couch and opens his laptop. There's right, there's wrong, and then there's whatever he's doing now to cope. Thats somewhere in-between. 

And in the room, 10 feet by 13, every wall is bare. Holes where picture frames used to hang, where concert tickets and letters were tacked up as a last memorial to Melanie Steele, not long since dead and buried. Josh sits on the couch, and with a tapping of fibonacci sequence on his knee, begins to calculate how much water it would take to fill the room and drown out everything all together.

--------

Mel Steele

4:01 Today 

After a life outside, Josh doesn't know how to analze it from the in. He looks at the big picture not the parts, so how can he look at whats left of his life? All her work is coming undone like driveway chalk and spring rain. 

Mel Steele5:32 AM Yesterday 

Jack, even with all his faults has always been able to help his brother. But not this time. This time Josh is left behind with facts Jack can't save him from. No matter what he protects, security, love, life- he feels destined to loose it. Again and again. 

Mel Steele 

10:23 AM Friday

Numerical processing is the last break, the last resistor that reads infinity. Theres no more patterns, no more significance or problem solving, Theres just numbers and facts. It's the greatest tradedgy. Even in pain we exist, but to cease to define existence by how we feel is to close off humanity all together. He is alone in his thinking, in his socializations, in a lack of any hope. 

Joshua Taylor

Saturday December 21st- medium pencil, black journal, back left drawer

If this is the last time, the last breath, the last hug, I want to believe that it isn't.

If this is the last time don't tell me, rather give me hope for tomorrow and tomorrow will come.

I have seen that what is hoped for arrives, sunrise ends in sunset, rain in shine, and me in you.

I have seen enough of this world to know last times make a heart splinter numb.

If it was the last time, why didn't you say so?

I could have come home much earlier, stayed on the phone much longer, or laughed a little longer.

At least a little longer than I did the last time. 

So why didn't you just ask?