I was quite literally writing the next chapter of my Glee story in my head when I was overcome with the urge to write an angst-filled Derek Venturi fic. And now I get the feeling that I have lost my touch. Review anyway, please.
Disclaimer: Don't own.
When your twenty-one you think you might be looking for love in all the wrong places.
(But you've always firmly believed that old dogs can't learn new tricks, so down your shot and walk over to the hot blonde at the other end of the bar.)
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You feel like one night you went to sleep tangled around her and the next she was gone.
It wasn't like that, though. You tried, she tried harder. Things and people and feelings and life just got in the way, but sometimes you wonder if maybe you didn't really try. If maybe you pretended to for the sake of not being proven a failure again.
(But you are one and you're Derek Venturi and this shouldn't be this hard.)
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She's constantly in motion. Whirling and twirling around life like if she stops for a second the plates she's juggling in the air will fall. So she leaves you standing there wishing you had the energy or talent to keep up with her.
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The first night, after high-school and college and her, when you're lying in the dark of your apartment you dream of your future. Record companies and hockey and friends and curled, brunette locks you can wrap around your fingers, and ballet slippers thrown over doorknobs, and white picket fences and…
Wait, what were you talking about again?
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When you're fifteen nothing hurts and nothing bleeds, and life is easy. Invincibility was the name of the game and you play it often.
When you're twenty-six everything hurts and everything bleeds, but by then it's the norm, so you grab the tequila bottle off the fridge, and turn the pages of your black book to m.
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You've never been very religious, but two weeks after your mom leaves, your dad comes in at eight on a Sunday morning, and tells you to get up and put on the suit you got for your birthday last year. (There's still a tag on it.)
The pastor, or rabbi, or priest, or whatever, talks about the Ten Commandments and you pick at a string on your leg until the word adultery comes up.
"A man who was lust for a women in his heart has committed adultery also," he says and you're twelve and hate your dad based solely on the words your mom yelled at him in the basement the day she left, so you smirk when the pastor, rabbi, priest, whatever looks your way, and hope that this place has confession.
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It's not until you're twenty-five and watching your step-sister across the dining room table at Christmas, do you realize that he wasn't looking at your dad. He was looking at you.
(When you're twenty-nine you don't R.S.V.P to her wedding and, really, a fucking scarlet letter pinned to your chest would be less obvious.)