That One Tree Behind the Reg. Table: Billy K & Lin A
The transition was bumpier than Lin anticipated. It was turbulent, mentally and emotionally, laminar reality sheared into a cascade of vortices, all confusion. His internal inertial forces dominated, got top-heavy. His proverbial Reynolds number soared, and chaos seeped in, only too happy to kick his ass off of the Stability Train, which isn't a scientific term, but a fitting one. After all, the way he saw it, he'd been raised in a shitkicker town, smaller than Repose, where everyone literally knew everyone, where he was an outsider-insider. Or insider-outsider? Whatever. He knew small towns. The pros and cons, as it were. He should've been fine, no wayward kinetic energy dissipating faster and faster, unspooling him by his fucking large intestine. But, no.
He'd never anticipated running into Daniel or into Aubrey—or Louis, or Sam, or anyone, if not ever again, then in February of 2016. And his careful, delicate, very convincing pantomime of mental health degraded so fast. It was easy to slip back into the ruts in the road of an old relationship, walk-worn; it was easier still to reel oneself back in after a pretty unrestricted period of expansion, like, emotionally.
He was a coward and he was hiding. I mean, that's all there really was to it. Because, sure, he could make metaphors out of turbulent flow and fluid dynamics and he could the Bee Sting with his yo-yo, which, for the record, he had on hand (pun intended)—and that shit is complicated af, a freehand choreography with counterweight, but, he couldn't face his own shit. Which was cowardly. He didn't trust himself to be as cool about Louis and Daniel as he wanted to be, so he retreated into the safety net of the internet and its Mariana-Trench depths of modica, trivia, and obscurity. He chilled with Critical Point Theory for Lagrangian Systems, amusing only himself with the notion of L2 being legit his life between Aubrey and Daniel (and he got to call them 'large bodies' lmao).
Anyway, the point was he was a coward, but that he'd still come out to hunt for eggs, bc, well, he liked hunting for eggs. (Not outside of the context of Easter, in case you were worried.) So here he was, tracking the shift of angles that allowed him to watch Clark Kent turn into Superman and back, courtesy of lenticular printing. He was backed up to that lone, stripped tree behind the registration table, ass resting on ugly-ass bark, but he thought he probably stood out enough for anyone looking for his nametag. Chicago Bulls t-shirt, brown cords, and his SMPTE color bar jacket hanging open. Also, his nice-ass kicks (Neff x Pony Tropical City Hi-Tops). No gloves, no hat. No music either.
He looked up from the transition of a man to a hero on interlaced and bound images to see if he could find a 'Billy.' 'Lin' had to be easier to find in this whitewashed mess. His Bee Sting got stuck on his finger right at the end and he swore. "Fuck you, Jesus—"