InsaneJournal

The smoke detector lay in pieces beside its battery on the kitchen table; there were specks of drywall in the mess of dust and glasses and bottles that made up the rest of the clutter. On the sofa were shopping bags, the snipped ends of guitar strings, a jacket and scarf, a ripped-into carton of cigarettes - and on the floor, at Llewyn's feet, his mute and dissipated audience, were the dry remains of a six-pack of Schaefer. A box of records, overflow from his bedroom, was wedged between the sofa and the wall, propping up his guitar case.

For someone who owned essentially nothing, he took up a lot of real estate. Too much - he was starting to realize the record player had been a waste of both money and space, that that wasn't how things were done anymore, that almost all of the recordings taking up so much cubic footage in his room were available in invisibly small packages. But it had felt important to get established. He'd felt better surrounded by things that resembled his own. He'd needed something to grab onto (even before he'd wound up here, he'd needed it like nobody's business) and when he'd gone looking he'd gone looking for music.

Anyway, it had all been chump change next to the guitar. What did it matter?

He was playing now, picking out a subdued arrangement of The Banks of Champlain, almost self-indulgently slow and spare. Outside it was sunny, cool, a little too much like the last October he remembered. Things had been a little slow. There had been plenty of time to kick around, and just enough money to make an evening wasted in the park seem like a luxury instead of a fatal mistake. And there had been Mike - which meant feeling good, feeling all right, knowing things would turn out one way or another, that there would always be someone to rest on.

None of that now. But he had a a place to stay and he had a guitar, and he was spending the day with both of them, playing in the living room on the tripartite theory that the acoustics were better, that music was to be shared, and that roommates were assumed to be tolerant until they proved themselves otherwise.

While thousands their freedom and rights were defending,
The din of their arms sounded dismal to me.
For Sandy, my love, was engaged in the action,
Without him I value this world not a fraction,
His death would have ended my life in distraction
As mournful I strayed -

He muttered a quiet fuck and leaned over to drag his phone out of his jacket pocket and fumble for the tuner app one of the record store kids had downloaded for him. Whether it was was the technology, or the new strings, or his fucking brain or god knew what else, he couldn't get through an hour without having to get things back on track.

In readjusting his guitar on his knee he kicked over a couple of cans, sending them rolling insensibly toward the door; and suddenly it seemed much more important to be cleaning up than anything else, and he was stooped over under the kitchen sink digging out a garbage bag, bad news for the empty collection of room 407.