Amputations
Part Eight: It's Hard to…Never-mind.
It was a twenty minute walk to Haku's apartment. His directions had been perfectly clear so luckily, I had no trouble finding it at all. The apartment was in a poorer section of town, though it was not falling apart, like many of the buildings that surrounded it. I stopped for a moment when I reached the entrance. An air of foreboding floated around me, as if trying to warn me that I should not go inside.
The automatic doors slid open, welcoming me. I pushed away any hesitation that I had and went in. A few of the people in the lobby gave me curious looks, as I was hardly a "local" to the area, but I ignored their prying eyes and made a straight line to the elevator. I pushed the yellow 'up' button and stepped back, keeping my eyes on the numbers above the elevator doors. Someone else joined me, a tall, thin, red haired girl. She was chewing enthusiastically on a piece of gum and smelled faintly of marijuana.
After about a minute, the doors opened and the two of us stepped inside. The girl pushed the button for floor number five. I hit number six and resolved to leaning against the wall.
I tried, with difficulty, not to look at her. She was unusually skinny. Her hair was long, vivid, and rested on her shoulders like a sleeping animal. The clothes she wore were tight fitting and revealed more than they covered up. She was tapping her foot (she was wearing a pair of flimsy flip-flops) to a beat that only she could hear. The elevator played no music.
She fixed me with a hard stare, her blue-green eyes narrowing suspiciously. "Do I got somethin' on my face, kid?" she asked a slightly offended tone in her voice. She looked at me with the expression someone might wear when they inspected a smelly, dead fish.
"No."
The elevator was taking longer than I had expected. Next time, I decided that I would take the stairs.
The girl blew a bubble with her gum and immediately popped it. "Wha'cha lookin' at me for, then?" she continued, obviously not in a particularly decent mood. I had done nothing to make her mad, but I had been staring. That was sometimes all it took to send someone over the edge.
"No reason." I was not too curious about her. She was not very pretty and she had a strange way of talking. As I spoke, I noticed that she had drawn her eyebrows on with a make up pencil. They did not match her hair color at all; they were black.
She snorted a laugh as the elevator came to a halt. "Cute, kid, real fuckin' cute," she said, "I'll be seein' ya around. Visit me sometime too, call boy." Giggling at her own private joke, she stalked out of the elevator. "Name's Tayuya. Room 509. Got it? Good." She winked at me and was gone.
…Call boy?
I could only wonder what she meant as the doors closed again the elevator began to ascend once more. If she was the sort of person who inhabited this apartment building, I was not sure I would like to go there too often. Haku, at least, acted like a normal person. He did not talk like an uneducated drug addict, nor did he give people odd nicknames. Unlike Tayuya, Haku was normal.
After another minute, the elevator reached the sixth floor. The doors opened and I stepped out, into a dank hallway. Two of the lights had burned out, giving the whole hallway a dim look, like something one might see in a nightmare. I took a deep breath and walked to Haku's door. The false gold numbers against the wood burned into my skull; room 606. I lifted my hand and knocked on the door. For a moment, I looked back to the elevator. It seemed much further away than it really had been.
I did not wait long; only a few moments after I knocked, Haku opened the door. He gave me a hazy smile and moved aside to let me enter. Over the phone he had not sounded too bad, but seeing him in person…he looked like a train wreck. It was completely different from the constantly perfect Haku I knew at school. Now, his long hair was in a tangled mess, haphazardly put into some sort of bun at the back of his head. His skin had a sickly look and his eyes appeared to be a little glazed over.
"Are you sure you're well enough for visitors?" I asked, standing close to the doorway in case he did change his mind. I did not want to be a burden to him.
Haku gave me a careless shrug and went further into the one room apartment. He sat down on the floor, by a low table and motioned for me to join him. "Don't worry about it," he said, obviously congested, "I don't think I'm contagious or anything." As he spoke, he got a cigarette out of the pack sitting on the table and lit it up after fumbling with the lighter a few times.
An awkward silence followed.
I took that time to look around the apartment. The first thing I noticed was how incredibly small it really was. It was as if the two of us were sardines in a tiny can, squished in with all of Haku's belongings. The room itself was clean and sparsely furnished, leaving an area for Haku to roll out his futon every night. There was a little kitchenette, though the oven and the sink looked like they could fall apart at any moment. All in all, the place was more or less how I had imagined it. Haku was not the sort of person to spend a lot of time making the apartment look lived in or perfect…but he was not the sort to leave it uncared for, either.
"You want a cigarette?" Haku asked, holding the pack out to me in an unenthusiastic manner. His words brought me out of my thoughts and back to the fact that I was visiting Haku, not just inspecting his apartment on my own.
I nodded. "Yeah," I replied simply and took one out of the pack. He handed me his lighter, which was almost out of fluid. Once I lit the end, I took a long drag and then exhaled, the smoke drifting up into the air, lazily surrounding both of us.
Haku gave me a strange look as he tapped the ashes into the old, glass ashtray on the table. "I heard something a little weird the other day," he said, "You know…" There was a blatant pause. "My friend told me there's a language that's got a thousand different words for 'love'. Sort of how there's a hundred different words for 'snow' in all those Eskimo languages."
I was not sure if he had meant for the pause or not. It almost seemed as though he had wanted to tell me something else and then thought better of it. "Don't we have different words for that, too?" I asked, going along with Haku's strange subject. Meanwhile, my mind was busy wondering just what he was originally going to say, but there was no way I could ask him without putting him in an uncomfortable situation.
He seemed to think my question over quite thoroughly before giving me an answer. "Yeah, I think we do. Love, affection, affinity…sex," he replied, "But I don't really think the last one fits that well." With a quick shrug, Haku smiled at me a bit deviously.
…Sex? That had nothing to do with what we were talking about. Haku was acting very strange, so I just blamed it on the fact that he was sick and was probably not thinking straight. "Not really," I said. Suddenly I felt awkward. We were just talking about something stupid, pointless, totally irrelevant to anything. It made no sense for me to get antsy about any of it.
"Hmm…Gaara, have you ever had sex?" Haku asked me, apparently pretty interested in the topic. He did not seem to have any hesitations in asking me that question either. It had slipped from his lips as easily as anything else he had ever said to me.
I stared at him, almost unable to believe he had just asked me such a thing. When we talked at school, Haku never spoke of anything like that. Now that we were alone, it seemed to be all that he was interested in. "Er, no," I replied slowly, "I'm only fourteen…" Age really had nothing to do with it. I had no interest at all in sex or anything of the sort. Most boys around my age were discovering sex and were all extremely thrilled by the idea of it. I thought it was disgusting. I couldn't stand the idea of merging my body with someone else's. As selfish as it sounds, that was how I felt. Those feelings have not changed much.
A smile twitched onto his mouth. It almost looked like Haku was going to laugh. "Do you want to?" He continued the string of questions as if he were some sort of strange, sexual therapist. It did not bother him at all that it was really none of his business at all.
"Not really," I said, hoping that would be the end of it.
It wasn't.
Haku's smile turned into a frown. "Why not," he persisted, as if he were offended by my answer.
I did not understand why this mattered so much. Sex was just something I had never bothered to think about or desire. There was no way I was the only person in the world to feel that way. "It doesn't matter," I said. It really didn't. Haku's insistence and curiosity were starting to put me on edge. I knew if he did not stop soon, something bad would happen and I would end up losing the only friend I ever had.
He sighed and smashed the end of his cigarette out in the ashtray. "Your choice; just thought I'd ask," he said, "It's a little overrated anyway." Haku gave the ashtray an idle, almost bored look before turning his gaze back to me.
Now it was my turn to be curious. "What do you mean?" I asked. Just moments ago, he had seemed to hold it in such high esteem…Now it was as if he hardly enjoyed it at all.
Haku scratched at the back of his head. "It's kind of hard to explain, but…Well…Once you've done it once, it's like you've done it a million times," he said, "The whole special feeling is gone, like it gets scrubbed off more and more every time you do it. I don't know. It's just not that fun, really." He sat back, lowering his arm away from the table, a thoughtful expression on his face.
His answer barely made any sense to me. I did not know what this 'special feeling' was that he had mentioned or how it could eventually vanish over time. My brother always made it sound as though sex was the best thing that could ever happen to a person. "So…Are you saying that I shouldn't waste my time?" I asked. If he said that was the case, then I would know for sure that my disinterest was not a strange thing at all. In fact, if he said I was right, then I would finally feel some sort of sense of normalcy.
"No, that's not it at all," Haku said, laughter in his voice, "You just have to find the right person to share that special feeling with. If you do it with someone who's not that special person, then it's just a bad feeling, a nasty situation you'd rather get out of as quickly as possible. But when you do find that special person, nothing else matters. It's like you're invincible and no body can even try to hurt you." I could only assume that he was speaking from experience, which led me to believe that he already had this 'special person' he was talking about.
"Do you have a special person yet, Gaara?"
That question took me by surprise. I did not count anyone as a special person. Haku was the closest that had ever become something of a friend, but I was not sure if I felt anything beyond friendship for him. Love was not something I felt. I had realized that years before. I hardly even knew what love really was. At one point, my uncle had tried to explain it to me, but his words were lost on me now.
"No."
"You've never been in love, then?"
"No!" I was sick of Haku's personal questions. As someone who had never felt love or received love from anyone, there was no way I could have known if I had ever been in love in the first place.
I blacked out.
(Author's Note: Wow. College is eating my soul. But the semester is basically over so expect more from me soon!)
