John "Johnny" Jones (suppressant) wrote in genome_project, @ 2011-07-31 21:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | july 2011, solo |
Who: Johnny Jones
What: Solo. Johnny loses it.
When: Sunday
Where: His basement
Rating: PG
The low rumbles of some vague dance song poured over the house. It was unclear which song it was exactly. It didn’t even matter. The sound of it only grew louder and louder as one approached the basement where Johnny’s DJ equipment was always set up. His antique turntables that he would never get rid of sat in the corner, while his portable DJ stand stood toward the back wall. On it, he had his laptop and his mixer. The screen of his laptop showed a song playing. Its pitch control looked almost identical to a heart monitor as it tracked along throughout the song.
On the floor by the table stood the speakers and the amplifier. They made the walls and the floor tremble slightly with the base hit each time. If anyone had really been paying attention to the song playing, they would have realized that the song went about a minute or two in and then somehow doubled back and repeated that same part over and over again. It had been doing that for the past hour. The room was without another noise and motionless. Had there been no music playing it would have felt as if there was no one there. But there was.
Toward the far back corner sat a boy. His knees were drawn up to his chest. His chin propped up on top of them. And he was hugging himself as if he was the only person in the world who loved him. He was trembling as well. It wasn’t clear though whether he trembled due to the loud base hits of the song or for some other reason. Otherwise, he had barely moved during the entire time when the song had been playing on repeat. For an entire hour.
It wasn’t happening anymore. He couldn’t get it to work right. All his life, Johnny Jones understood one thing and one thing only: music. Music was the only language he could ever speak fluently without any problems or misunderstandings. It had always been perfect. He could calculate beats in his head without ever once having to crunch numbers. With music, it was always pure harmony. Until now...
Prior to the hour spent with the song on a loop, Johnny had been attempting a remix. This was something he could do with his eyes closed usually. He always knew which two songs matched in beat and could be mixed. He could always do it. Today had been the first time that he just couldn’t get into it. He couldn’t decipher the beats. He couldn’t figure out why the songs sounded so off together. It didn’t make any sense in his head, and he was getting more and more frustrated with himself. Finally, he just decided to forget the whole thing. He left the song playing on the last edit he’d made and went to go sit in his corner.
So much had happened to him in such a short time. And he was so young. He wasn’t feeling sorry himself though. He was angry, angrier than he had ever been before. He wasn’t angry at Penny for being sick and always hogging the attention and making him worry like it was going out of style. He wasn’t angry at Kaylee or the baby for potentially ruining whatever part of his childhood he had left. He wasn’t even angry at his mother who had thrown herself into her work at the mention of said pregnancy and hadn’t given Johnny a single word of encouragement. No, he wasn’t angry about any of those things.
He was angry at himself.
He was angry that he couldn’t be strong enough for Penny, that he couldn’t stay with her longer and that he had actually cried once because the thought of her actually dying this time was too great for him to keep bottled up. He was angry that he hadn’t been more careful with Kaylee. He had ruined not just his life, but hers as well, and possibly their baby’s. He was angry that he couldn’t just man up and deal with all of this. There was so much he still had to figure out and no one to help him with it. The only guidance he had at the moment was the smallest speck of a memory he had of a picture of his father, who had left them. And he was sure that history wasn't going to repeat itself, not if he could help it.
He was so angry that even the music didn’t want him to understand it anymore. What was he to do? Music was his lifeline here. It was the only idea of a future he could think of and hold on to. He had to figure out how to be a strong man for Kaylee and their baby, to get a job while finishing school and learn to be a father. A good father and not just some asshole who skirted his responsibilities. He had to push past his fear some way, somehow.
The music played on and looped back to the beginning. Johnny was still sitting in the corner, holding his legs and crying. He was still a boy who was about to become a father, who had come so close to losing his cousin and best friend, who had lost his most sacred connection with the one thing he loved most in the world. In a fury, he picked up the nearest object and chucked it at his DJ table. Luckily, it completely missed his amplifier and hit the back of the laptop, causing the music to stop abruptly.
The house was suddenly bathed in silence, save for the weeping sounds of a boy whose childhood ended much too soon.