James Ewell Brown (fumblingtowards) wrote in britannia_ny, @ 2009-11-20 00:21:00 |
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Current mood: | lonely |
Entry tags: | jim brown, nathan tarn |
attn: Nathan
Jim isn't the kind of person to fall apart so bad he can't function. There've been too many bad things in his life for him not to have an idea how to look good and functional. He goes to school on Monday and teachers his classes, maybe a little more bad-tempered to his students than usual, but nothing special.
At home, he's been surviving mainly on cigarettes and Dantrium, since food makes his stomach turn. He hasn't touched any of Nathan's things, has left them all exactly as they were, in some kind of fervent hope that it will mean things don't have to change.
On Monday evening Amanda calls. Her fourteenth birthday passed uneventfully. She's still taking horse lessons, getting better on the time. Her mother doesn't really want her to call him, and it's true that her stepfather is a perfectly nice man whom she utterly adores, but she's got a small rebellious streak that keeps her in touch with her father. On the phone he's warm, albeit a little reserved from shyness (he never did get used to having a daughter before he had to give her up); before she hangs up she finishes with "Love you, Daddy," and he finds that unexpectedly his throat feels thick and tight.
He goes through a pack of Jacks after that, although he quit smoking when he got out of college. He sits at the kitchen table thinking about Laurie Jean and Amanda, back when she was first born and it felt like that family was really going to work out, before he decided to go back to school and Laurie Jean realised just how uncomfortable all his problems made her. He honestly doesn't blame her for that, just like he doesn't blame his parents for being afraid to have another child after he turned out sick. You can't, he figures, hate people for the choices they make when they're scared.
He thinks Nathan and Mike and exactly how much he's ruined his chance at starting over--because that's what this always was, it was him running away from the South so he could start over, so he could get away from that guilt and that shame, and it hasn't worked out after all. Maybe it's because he's always running, maybe if he stopped running. Maybe he should have stayed in Chattanooga, working for the company.
He wanders around his little house, superfluously one-floor now that the medicine has his shakes quelled, as superfluous as the cane Nathan carved him that he can't seem to let go of any more. It's his ugly furniture, his cheap plates and silverware. The things his mother gave him to prove she loved him, even defective. The piles of newspapers that he hasn't gotten around to recycling, the books he's collected after so many years, his desk with all the papers and folders and half-graded essays.
You can't hate people for being scared, but you can still stop loving them.
It would be reassuring if he could know whether he loved Nathan, or whether he was just tired of being alone. He was always cold, he had always been cold, and the only thing that made the slightest difference was somebody's warm self, the only way to keep himself from letting the great tragedy of having failed over and over and over quietly drown him, like yet another Willie Loman.
Part of him is sure it's love. Part of him had never been so happy. Part of him would give anything in the world to have Nathan back, and would never start another fight, never say another stupid thing, never try to ask for anything except the certainty of having him.
The other part just wants to be warm.
He smokes the last cigarette in the pack, and wonders what else he can do to distract himself.