A/N: Hey guys. So, this is my first novel-length SP fic, and I'm pretty stoked for it. I've been turning over ideas for a full-length Creek fic for months now, and I've finally landed on something that I can really work with long-term. A lot of the style is experimental, sort of bringing an artsier light to Craig's personality because I like to think there's more to him than guinea pigs and a chullo hat. I hope you guys enjoy the first chapter, and I look forward to reading your reviews!

Disclaimer – I disclaim.

Warning: Rated M for language, graphic sexual situations, adult themes, etc.

"And how do you feel about that, Craig?"

"I feel like I need a cigarette."

It's the same, every time I sit down in this chair. The same intrusive questions, the same droll replies—the same aggravated silence when I refuse to let down my walls to her, to give her what I know it is she wants. The truth. Well, what's the truth, anyways? It's all perspective and lately, I find myself lacking in that department.

She purses her lips. You've never met anyone who loves to purse their lips as much as this insufferable woman I call my 'doctor'. Swear to god, if you slapped a fat D&G on her mouth you could sell it for a thousand dollars on 5th Avenue.

She sighs.

"Why do you think you have such a hard time talking about yourself, Craig?"

I hate the way she says my name. Like I'm incapable of connecting it to myself without her stretching out each syllable like I just woke up from a twenty-year coma. Like some Rip Van Winkle shit. Like I'm dangerous—dangerous to her, dangerous to my family, dangerous to my friends—

Dangerous to yourself.

I grunt and snatch my bag off the couch, pulling a cigarette from the front pocket before she can bother to tell me not to. The sound of the match slipping against the rough paper inside my wallet is soothing, and I bring the cigarette to my lips with the care someone might give an infant child, or a seedling. But that's me, isn't it? Empty and material—I know no joy outside of my own unyielding self-deprecation.

She cracks the window. We've been at this for four months, after all. We have our antics down to a science, down to an art. Like some sort of sick pantomime. She knows her part and I know mine, and we play them with ease and integrity so that neither of us can ever get hurt. We've come to a mutual understanding of one another. There are boundaries, after all—even the psyche has those. She asks me questions, and I smoke a cigarette. She gets paid, and I go home. We get each other. It's simple, this way.

"What do you want to know?"

"Whatever you'd like to tell me, Craig."

She's almost precious, in a batty, narrow, gawky sort of way. I can't say I like or dislike her. I can't really say anything about her at all, only that she's gray matter. A lone voice in a sea of pallid faces; I'm content with that. I sigh lazily and take another drag, stretching my body out against the soft leather sofa beneath me.

"I am a bead of sweat on the universe's cunt, trickling fiercely down toward its disgusting bare feet where I will be absorbed into the proverbial ground to rust and rot for the next 20 millennia—I'm cool with that."

She's quiet. That's okay, I like the silence. It's thick, tangible almost. I could reach out and touch it, cut it and serve it a la mode, mold it and mash it together in my hands like clay. I like this sort of quiet, it gives me time to think. Not that I think about much, really. I mostly just make shapes with the lines in the ceiling. It's that white, delicately churned stucco that's supposed to give rooms texture, but just makes you feel sort of held in. Trapped. Sometimes I picture that ceiling getting closer, closing in on my body and crushing me down into the floor, pushing all the life out of my body in the form of fluid and dust and water-based particles. It's my own twisted, backwards, version of a daydream.

I know that I'm not sane. I know that I haven't been quite right for years now. I know, also, that I'm nowhere near 'crazy'. Perhaps just human, at the very core of things. Just a sad, vulnerable little human playing humanoid in the headlights and hiding from the big bad wolf behind cigarettes in the dark.

Sometimes I take the shortcuts. Sometimes.

Sometimes I take the long way around, cruising the surface streets like some black-eyed predator. Watching, waiting in indifference for the change that never comes. I've lived in this shit town my whole life, and still sometimes it's hard to pick my way through it. I drive from one end to the other, searching every corner for a clue, a landmark in the void that'll direct me home. I've lost bits of myself on these drives, lost crucial parts of my mind that have, in years past, allowed me to exist cohesively with my peers.

I've always thought of life as a sort of game that we all like to play, the board marked occasionally by seemingly significant events made just to make you feel like you're worth more than the air you breathe. Birthdays, holidays, graduations, engagements, weddings, children. I don't see it that way. To me, there are merely things that are and things that will continue to be long after I am gone. Each morning I wake up in my same bed and I do not feel that there is significance to my being awake, but I take advantage of it nonetheless.

I used to walk past the pet cemetery every morning on my way to school. It was unsettling, to see all the flowers on the graves. The tokens of remorse and fond memories, all laid out on the ground like that. The cemetery by the church never had so many flowers—but perhaps animals deserve them more than people. I only say that because when I think of someone laying flowers on my grave years after I die I feel uncomfortable and slightly sick. Driving past it now, the rows of headstones look dark and dismal and unassuming. Perhaps they've forgotten the lives they were made to represent, the countless ghosts that crawl between the aisles of their markings and put salt into the ground.

I live in a house on the end of a quiet street. It's not a particularly assuming house, just a place where I live when I'm not busy drifting through the day in school. Fucked, don't you think it? I can't help but wonder sometimes why anybody bothers, why any of us try to work towards moving forward when death will only set you back. Oh, death. The great 'reset' button. I hope when I die I come back as something simple. Maybe, when I die, I'll come back as a guinea pig, and some head-fucked loner will adopt me and name me and keep me luxuriously happy with a full bowl of water and an orange slice.

I pause when I get out of my car, because there is something off about the picture. It only takes my mind a moment to register the blackness of the streetlamp in front of my walk. It flickers back to life for a moment, going out too quickly as if to say 'Hello, Craig. Remember this?'

And I do. Fuck if I could forget it.

It had been colder that night, I remember that because I'd been wearing my leather jacket. He was standing beside the streetlamp with his shoes in his hand, looking up into the light as though he were waiting to be abducted. I'd given it a perfunctory glance upwards in interest. No aliens, just the stars—quiet, and cold.

"Hey."

It wasn't the cleverest thing I could've thought up to say, but he'd looked at me and that was all I'd really wanted for him to do.

"There's a moth."

"What?"

"Fuck—Shit—A moth. It's—Jesus. It's a fucking moth."

I think I'd fallen in love with him right that very second, standing beneath my streetlamp and cursing into the dark like a biker on acid. It seems hollow now, an empty picture because the truth is that I haven't spoken to him in months. That in the cell of my mind I know that we probably won't ever speak again, if only because it would hurt him too much.

I light a cigarette and watch the light flicker with the memory, indifferent.

Craig,

Stopped by and you weren't here. Call me?

- B.

She leaves me notes. The funny thing is, I barely ever see her when I am home. Which is all the time. Anytime I go out, though, which is almost never, she leaves me a fucking note. I won't go see her, she knows that. She taunts me with them. These messages. I can't fuck her. Won't fuck her, even if she was the first girl in our class to get tits.

It's a syndrome, living in a small place. Years and years of the same people and after a while you just sort of crash into each other. Blink. Stumble. And it's the only way you reconnect, because after all this time no one really cares about anyone else. That's where girls like Bebe get these silly ideas. I can't say I blame her, though. Not here, not in this void. You're starving, after a while. For movement, for small conversation. For schedules. All that shit you thought you hated, suddenly it's gone and you would give anything to hear someone say 'Well how about them Yankees?'

It was Bebe who pushed me to go after Thomas—she was the one who told me what to say. How to make the right moves. If it weren't for her, I wouldn't have stood a chance. It's funny because Bebe wants to suck me off, and it doesn't seem very sensible in my head, since she doesn't really have the equipment I'm looking for. But that's just the world isn't it?

I can't forget the last time with Thomas. I play it over and over in my head, sometimes. Trying to find the flaw. My mistake, my error.

It was a Tuesday night. We were enjoying the darkness on the balcony, in the wicker chair my parents had bought together before my mother stopped getting out of bed and my father stopped coming home altogether. His hair smelled like dry leaves and something else I could never quite describe. Things seemed almost normal from where we were. There was no wind, no reprimands. Nothing keeping our skin from touching save a few pieces of fabric and the conjecture of innocence. Even the moon had decided to show itself that evening, in all its opaque glory. Suspended and floating in space, stretched across the sky like a banner. I loved the way it bathed his skin in its glow.

"Thomas?"

"Craig?" he said in his quiet way. I ran my fingertips over his cheek, admiring the coolness and the smooth texture of his skin.

"I'm sorry."

He took a moment to reply.

"Fuck—What for?"

"For being shit."

He'd sat up, pulling his body free from my grasp. I waited with bated breath as he turned to look at me, his eyes suddenly wide and calculating.

"Why do you think that?" he'd asked, his voice not betraying the crass tick that usually plagued him when he was feeling anxious. I hadn't really known exactly what to say to him, after that. The truth? Everything seemed different when laced with the poison of the truth. I didn't want things to change. I would've stayed that way with him forever, frozen. I wanted to stay that way with him.

"I treat you awful sometimes. I'm ungrateful."

He turned from me, and my heart began to hammer in my chest.

"You can be awful," He said slowly, "but you're still my boyfriend. Shit. Craig?—"

He was beautiful when he looked back to me.

"I know you blame yourself for not feeling happy all the time. For not wanting me all the time. Fuck—Don't. I know you do. Because you're afraid to lose. Afraid of what you can't be sure of. Afraid of me. But mostly just yourself."

I'd put my arm across my face so that he couldn't see me crying. I felt so far away from him in that moment, a thousand miles from anywhere remotely close to his skin, his hands. His hazel eyes which peered at me through the dark, seeing through my mask the way no one had ever bothered to want to do before. I was nothing, I was no one. I was a candle in the wind and he was—he was everything.

It was his hands that brought me back to him. He placed his fingers on my arms, and ran them down my sides. I'd shuddered when I felt the tips on my bare stomach. We'd made love in the dark.

I used to have a book about insects. I used to really be into that. Insects and birds and things. There was one page I always kept dog eared. It was about the praying mantis. Generally uninteresting creatures, until you get to the part about sex. The female praying mantis, when placed in captivity, will begin to feed on the male while he fucks her. She just bites his head off, and in the process he fucks faster. She has no feelings about it. She doesn't stop, she doesn't think. She doesn't have remorse for him. He belongs to her, he's there to give her pleasure, to give her children. She's ruthless. A female praying mantis in the wild won't eat her mate. In fact, left to themselves, most mantis couples show an overwhelming amount of affection towards one another.

How fickle we become, when we sleep in the city.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to sleep with her. Bebe. I imagine her skin being soft. Her hair is matted, though. Rough and teased. Not like Thomas. I can't imagine my fingers in Bebe's hair.

At night I can feel Thomas's hair on the pillow. I can smell it, too. Like leaves and smoke and frozen apples. I used to eat them as a kid. Winter would come too quickly for the fall and freeze the apples in the trees. I can recall my mother cutting them on the kitchen counter. There was a spice to the smell, some extra spark from the cold.

I've taken to counting days lately. Marking them in numbers on my calendar. I don't know what I'm counting to, or what it will all amount to when the months are gone away. But I think perhaps I'll write a song, or a lyric. Or perhaps a symphony. "A Tribute to Days, Made into Numbers, Calculated in Sets of 31 or Less". By Craig Tucker.