This entire story was completely inspired by Jack Kerouac and all of his amazing poetry. :)
I don't own Naruto. I wish I did, even if Kishimoto is messing with my head with these past few chapters.
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" -Jack Kerouac
Chapter 1 - early pioneers in the knowing
Tiny glass-like rivulets of rainwater slid down the pane of glass that served as Deidara's window to the street below. He was huddled up beside it, his back to a stack of pillows pressed against a steadily ticking radiator that gave off a pleasantly constant wave of heat. He could hear the rain drumming against the other windows in his tiny apartment, and he listened closer to hear the sound of rushing water forcing its way through the gutters on the floor above.
Digging his bare toes against the smooth grain of his wooden floor, he kept his gaze fixed on the sky above, made into a mosaic by the scattered droplets on the window. There were varying shades of gray in that mosaic, and for a moment, he tried to name them all. Cloud, ice, ash, cemetery stone, concrete in the shade, concrete in the sun, daylight glinting off a silver car, graphite… There were far too many shades to name, so he gave up for the moment and blankly watched the water strike the glass.
The apartment he had chosen in the center of Greenwich Village in New York City was what he had called 'the poet's paradise'. To him, the essence of his work lay in the environment. His style of poetry called for a place where artists before him had slept, ate, drank, shit, cried, and laughed. It called for a place that could be both horribly gloomy, and then bright and sunny. It called for a place where nothing was permanent. The apartment was the perfect place.
Deidara had taken the time to learn all he could about the building he now resided in. It had been built in the 1920s as a residential complex for the mildly elite. This was made apparent in the delicately carved ceilings in each room, trying to copy the gilded halls of manors in Europe with a decent amount of success. Old, smoke-colored fireplaces once provided heat to each apartment, where now they stood empty and forbidden to be used by the proprietor (Deidara mostly used his as a sort of filing cabinet now, where he stacked crates full of folders he would never open again). One of the biggest clues to the building's history were doors that where between apartments, instead of facing the hall. The doors that connected two apartments once connected two wings of one whole apartment. Deidara, not being particularly fond of his neighbors, pushed a bookcase in front of his door, just in case the people on the other side decided that they needed to pay their neighbor a visit.
The apartments served their purpose well, even through the Great Depression and World War II. Yet after the war, when most GIs returning were able to move their families into classy suburbs, the apartments were inhabited by a much different sort. It was said that Greenwich Village gave birth to the Beat Generation. If that was the case, then the apartment building had once been a cradle. Poets and painters soon lived in the rooms, leaving behind their legacies by scrawling across the walls with charcoals, pencil, paint, or whatever they could get their hands on. Deidara's apartment was no different. In fact, he had specifically chosen his apartment for the fact that a poet had lived there for fifteen years, writing all across the walls. One poem Deidara was particularly fond of was scribbled on the wall in the kitchen, just above the light switch.
I ran out of
eggs this morning so I
made a grocery list.
When I went to the grocery store I bought
everything except eggs.
Some of the other poems had been scrubbed away by flustered maids, commanded by the landlord to make the apartment presentable to buyers. Luckily, the day Deidara walked into the apartment to look at it, he had caught one of them tisking and huffing over one scribed above the toilet, which now read:
I remember my shaving k—
today is the day I ask Mary-A—
tomorrow I get some she—
The maid snarled at the persisting gray smear of blurred pencil, scrubbing at it profusely when Deidara put his hand on her arm, causing her to yelp. "What are you doing that for?" she all but screeched.
"Don't clean any more of those off," he commanded.
"Why not? It's graffiti," she barked back, taking the liberty of twitching her hand to get rid of a string of letters.
"It's art. You're killing it."
"Listen, mister," she huffed, putting her rubber-glove-clad hands on her hips and blowing a long strand of black hair from her face. "That landlord pays me to scrub this shit off and if he asks me to, I do it. Capiche?"
"No capiche," Deidara retorted. "Because I'm buying this place."
And so he did. Four days after he looked at it, he forked over the money and moved in, with only a futon, a plastic crate full of manila folders, a box full of empty or full notebooks with a large array of pens, and a dirty duffel bag half-full of clothes. He had no furniture (other than a moth-bitten sofa left in the apartment, which felt like it was made of dirty carpet fibers), no food, no nothing.
Even after a full year of living there, it hadn't changed much. The sofa remained, being used as a half-time bed for those who dared spend the night in his apartment. He had purchased a refrigerator from the 1980s that hummed dangerously at strange times in the middle of the night, and also a reasonably new stove (which if let running to long, gave off the oddest odor of fish sticks). The futon remained, the crates tripled in amount, the notebooks almost quadrupled, the pen collection became an inky variety show, and he got three new shirts and a nice pair of thrift store jeans.
Every now and then, he added a new poem to the walls, but only the best of the best from his poetry notebooks. On one rainy day, when the radiator wasn't working and there was a spot to the left of his futon that was leaking profusely, he wrote on the stained area on the wall, just below the leak:
Touching the greensnake walls and how they look
like tunnels and smears
in the snow and on the street
where the woman walks, sad, sad
her tears are on my ceiling
He thought it was remotely profound, and he enjoyed reading it from time to time. After three more rainy days—two weeks before the ceiling was repaired—the poem had a strange sort of bend in the middle, making it look somewhat like a water droplet. This made Deidara believe that nature thought it was one of his best poems.
Another poem was written neatly on a brick just above the fireplace, from the day Deidara got his first job at a Village bookstore just down the street.
I got a papercut and my finger bled some ink
that wrote a book with a tag
that sold for three dollars
That was also profound, he thought to himself. Nature didn't mark that poem, but it caught his eye more than the leaky wall poem, since he wrote it on a discolored brick that was a little brighter than all the others.
When money permitted and Deidara was feeling particularly artistic, he would make his way down to the art supplies store and buy modeling clay. In his box of notebooks and pens, he kept a small pocketknife and an object that looked like a small chisel. Just before he would sculpt, he would make a sort of mat out of pillows in front of his window and sit, meditating on life outside. There, an image would come to him and he would begin to make a masterpiece. It was always something from nature, be it a bird, a fly, a cat, a horse, or anything else he saw outside. They would take strange shapes that some persnickety art critics would call an undistinguishable mess, but what he called a flourish of art at its finest. He would leave the sculpture to dry and harden by his radiator, then place the final product in his closet, where he waited for the perfect day to take it outside and smash it on the pavement. Art was not permanent, he believed. Sculptures were no exception.
With that philosophy, sometimes it saddened him to see the writing on his walls. One day, they would be scrubbed away by finicky maids and persistent landlords. The leak in the ceiling might come back and wash away his writing. The fireplace might be replaced with a plaster wall and the bricks would be recycled or thrown in a landfill. The words scribed by the poet decades before him, and his own words would someday be gone and lost forever. Art is not permanent.
That's what was crossing his mind as he watched the raindrops slide on his window. The droplets would fall to the cement, and then evaporate when the sun came out. They weren't any more permanent than art. He heaved a sigh, fiddling with a pencil that was resting by his feet. Droplets kept drumming against the window, sliding…sliding…slid—yes, there was already a poem in his mind. He snatched up his pencil and turned to the empty wall beside the window, beginning to etch out his poem.
Slipperslide drops drumming and singing
on my window tonight is the show of the century!
Tomorrow people will forget.
