A/N: Have you guys watched Beginners? If you haven't, well, why not? Fantastic film, go watch it now! And if you have, well, then you may notice I flagrantly stole a line from the film. But hey, you've been warned - I'll apologize later, haha. :P


Tiredness is a very bizarre phenomenon.

I'll explain: the more time you sleep, the more tired you feel when you wake up, and so you sleep an insane amount of time again in an effort to eradicate that tiredness, but then you become incredibly tired again, and so your life just feels as if this stupid cycle is going to repeat itself for the rest of eternity. In the end, all you seem to be doing is hibernate, and the clock on top of your nightstand ends up turning into a villain worthy of the best villain traits that the best movie villain in the history of movie history didn't even know existed.

But that's not all, my friend - your eyelids turn against you, too, as if they were not part of the you that doesn't want to be tired. You'll be happy to find out that, on this particular day, mine only needed sun, doors, and voices to flutter open; the morning sun burning against my face, the front door being shut, and familiar voices talking in the hallway. But the struggle was not over yet, no: my enemy (oh, the clock) was sitting on top of my nightstand, rubbing its fictitious hands in anticipation, more than ready to judge me.

A little four over there, a little seven over here, and as it turns out, it was 4:07 in the afternoon. Not so much a morning sun, apparently.

I groaned so hard I probably disturbed whoever was sleeping on the opposite side of the world. I angrily kicked my sheets away like they were at fault. I also let out a long sigh, and I folded my hands under my head as I lay on my back, and then, I didn't move. I just stared up at the ceiling, and when my mind was ready to start functioning again, I simply thought. Another day, another thought. I thought about her, and I thought about me, and I thought about these 16 days, 12 hours, and 42 minutes in which her and me had completely stopped existing as a whole. I thought about the lines on her face, and the sound of her laugh, and the life that radiated from her mouth when she smiled and the hurt that radiated from her tears when she cried.

I thought about The Kiss, which I'd decided to rename The Last Fucking Kiss. And yes, I thought about The Last Fucking Kiss a lot. And I wished a lot, too, that someone had cleverly warned me beforehand that it was going to be the last one, because then I would've not kissed her on such a silly impulse, and so The Last Fucking Perfect Kiss would not exist, and therefore it would be neither perfect nor the last, and then thinking about it would not feel like such a mean stab to the heart.

I also thought about the flawed logics of Chandler Bing, which I thought could be written into a quite decent-ish book, and Christ, I thought about how much I missed her, and how much I wanted her, and how much I needed her, and I thought about how much I despised myself for being such a needy bastard, and so I felt tears prickle the back of my eyes until I blinked them away, because one of those so-called flawed logics of Chandler Bing is that Chandler Bing is the kind of jerk that talks about himself in the third person, yet Chandler Bing is not the kind of jerk that cries, not ever, and especially not when other human beings are involved. Oh, man.

Luckily for my sanity, my thoughts of flawed logics and whatnot were interrupted by my stomach growling violently, and I reasoned that overemotionalism was not a good enough motive to let myself die of starvation. Not yet, at least. I disentangled myself from the leftover sheets around me, and went to rummage through my pile of clothes, trying to find something decent I could wear to start mingling with the living.

I put on some jeans, because that was the easy part, but then no t-shirt seemed appropriate, or even close to OK. I'd just discarded the second green t-shirt in a row ("Why all the green?" I had whined. "I don't even like green that much,") when Ross happily trotted into the room with a carton box marked as 'ROSS CRAP' under his left arm.

First, he closed the door behind him. Then, he looked at me. After looking at me for an indecent period of time, he cleared his throat. But then he didn't say a single word. It's like he was waiting for me to take notice of him first or something. So, I wearily said, "Hello, Ross."

"Oh, hey," he answered almost immediately, shifting the box from one arm to the other. "Your face looks even better today."

I should clarify that this was not Ross blatantly coming on to me because I looked sensational that day, and so he simply couldn't resist himself and had to point it out (hah!). He was referring to my bar incident that had taken place the previous week, and that had left my face in deplorable conditions after having been almost knocked out by an ape. Those injuries/wounds/whatever actually healed quite fast and hence were long gone, so I suppose he just didn't know what to say, because I looked exactly like I had the day before, which was neither terribly good nor bad, but just like my normal self.

"Thanks, man," I absentmindedly said anyway, without diverting my attention from the pile of, hopefully, clean clothes that had been hastily thrown into a vacant chair by me, without any kind of sense or order. I thought that Monica would pass out just by taking a look at this mess, and then I felt another stab on my chest, because it hit me that all this knowledge about things she'd do was pretty much useless now.

"So... hey, you okay?" he asked after a beat, making it seem like this question had just popped into his head. An incredibly red and ugly t-shirt I'd never seen before made an appearance in my pile of clothes. Must be Ross' t-shirt, I internally reasoned.

"Yes, I'm fine," I said, the way you say it when you don't really mean it, but it sounds like the easiest thing to say. Ross didn't look pleased with my lame answer, probably because he wasn't brain-dead, but thankfully decided to let it slide.

"Okay," he cleared his throat again, leaving his box full of ROSS CRAP on top of his desk. "Anyway, I gotta run to the library - I have this final tomorrow and, dude, it's not looking good," he said around a laugh, cutting it short when I didn't reciprocate. "So, anyway," he said, now picking up a couple of books off his desk. "I'd better go now, I'm already running late."

"Sure, have fun," I said as he opened the front door, almost stepping outside. Almost.

"But hey, listen..." he abruptly turned around, lifting a finger and making it look like he'd suddenly changed his mind about something oh, so very important. He paused briefly, absentmindedly running his fingers over the cover of one of his books, and then he just narrowed his eyes at me for a second, his whole face pulling into a sad frown, like he was in front of a lost puppy. "It's just, seriously..." he shook his head, shrugging. "Are you gonna be alright, man?"

And I shot him a glance, and when I saw his expression, I finally stopped going through my clothes. Maybe it's because he looked undoubtedly worried, or sad, or maybe because his eyes were just full of pity, but I'm serious when I say that such a simple, innocent question made me feel like the entire world around me was going to collapse in the next five seconds.

Was I going to be alright? Hell, I reckon that it's very likely, but when someone asks you a direct question about it, you just don't know the answer - the only thing you know then is that the lump in your throat is getting too hard to swallow, and that the evil voice inside your head is ordering you to be sad.

More seconds ticked by, and I opened my mouth at last. "Yeah," I lied, nodding, and I think even my voice cracked a little.

"Okay..." he trailed off, unconvinced, shifting his books in his arms. "Well, then I guess I'll see you later, man."

"Sure, bye," I waved my hand at him, as lively as I could manage, giving him a tight-lipped smile. Still holding his books, he spun around and left.

And so I was alone, once again, with yet another green t-shirt in my hands.

"Anyway..." I said to no one in particular, picking the first decent and ungreen t-shirt (grey, actually) my pile of clothes seemed to offer. When I was fully dressed and equipped to go, or so I thought, I patted my empty pockets out of habit and noticed that I didn't have my wallet with me.

I mentally reasoned that I needed some money if I wanted to feed myself food that did not come from a smelly trash can, so I started searching around the room. This was the first time it truly bothered me how messy it had become in the last couple of weeks, and only because it was detrimental to my search. I suddenly felt very bad for Ross, having to coexist in this dumpster.

Now, when you've been looking for over five minutes with no positive results whatsoever, you start to get a little frustrated. And let me tell you that frustration leads you to do sort of weird things, like looking in places you never thought you'd look: inside a shoe, behind the closet, under your roommate's mattress (luckily for my peace of mind, nothing too private was in there). I'd moved to Ross' nightstand drawer by then, going through the contents and letting out frustrated, long sighs, when something caught my eye. It was squared, it was black, and it was almost completely new: it wasn't my wallet, of course, it was Ross' Moleskine.

For a blissful moment of ignorance, I truly wondered why it felt like such a poignant object to my heart, but then I remembered that it was the one Monica had picked out of curiosity and boredom one day, assuming it was mine, and where she'd been scribbling down some things I never even thought or bothered to check afterwards.

And this might seem irrational, and dangerously close to masochist behaviour, too, but I definitely wanted to read what it was now, even though rationality was trying to tell me that she'd just been doodling in it, and rationality was also trying to tell me that it was probably nothing. And yet.

And yet I wanted to confirm the nothingness with my own eyes.

So I picked it up from the open drawer, and then went to sit on my bed, wrapping my fingers around it tightly. Then I just took a deep breath. And then I took another. And then another. And then I mentally insulted myself for being so afraid of an inanimate object.

After a moment's deliberation, I finally opened it. I first went through some unimportant notes Ross had written a long time ago; most of them had Carol's name obsessively written over and over, and the most 'interesting' thing was a drawing of a ruler telling a boulder "You rock," and a boulder telling a ruler "You rule." I didn't want to snoop around, but I guess you can imagine nothing too intriguing was in there.

After reading a bit more through Ross' predictability, I finally found what I didn't want to find, not really, but that some part of me had tricked me into thinking I did. And oh my. I felt like it was staring back at me, seriously, flawlessly written in black ink in Monica's round and perfect handwriting, and it simply said, "Bing! You make me laugh, but it's not funny."

And it was so inconsequential, yes, but it meant so much to me now, in my time of despair, that I didn't know if I wanted to burn down the notebook out of spite or hold it tightly to my chest and begin to cry my eyes out like a big chunk of me knew I wanted to. I didn't want to be here, in the solitude of my own room, blinking back tears that would admit what a moron I'd been. I wanted to be with her, in the solitude of her own room, or in the solitude of mine, or in the solitude of a fucking crowded street, I didn't really care.

I thought about her, and pardon me the cliché, as this drug I simply could not get out of my system, no matter how hard I tried. I felt as if my arms were still used to reaching out for her in the morning when I woke up, and as if my eyes were still used to searching for her in a crowd, and as if my heart was still used to skipping a beat every time she walked into my field of vision. I suppose that the fact that I didn't know what scared me the most, that I mattered to her or that she mattered to me, was what scared me the most.

And I'll forlornly admit it: I was not going to burn Ross' notebook down, since I definitely didn't need another Geller against me, and so that only left me with the bawling option. And I was going to do just that, even though Chandler Bing does not cry, not ever, yet when I turned my head to the left, I finally found what I'd been looking for. Right there, comfortably tucked between my bed and my nightstand, from where it had probably fallen off, was my wallet. How ironic that things turn up when you've decided to focus your attention on your best friend's notebook, which holds a message written from the beyond by your ex-girlfriend. Or something to that effect.

After some more deliberation, I decided to put the Moleskine back in its place - no bawling - and then recollected the wallet from the floor and slid it into my back pocket. When I was about to go out the door at last, though, sentimentalism must've gotten the best of me, because I took a look around me and thought that a day this lonely should be prohibited.

Anyway, indeed.


I am not a picky kind of guy, especially when I'm that hungry, so I went into the first burger joint the neighborhood had to offer and ate by myself in a corner there, because I supposed they called it comfort food for a reason. Fifteen minutes later, I was making my way back to my dorm while smoking that much-needed cigarette (the smoke after sex and the smoke after food are the kind of pleasures one should not deprive oneself of), when my mind processed a sound that didn't feel quite right: that goddamned swing behind that goddamned building was creaking. Curiosity got the better of me, of course, and curiosity made me find out I had not gone crazy, and I was not imagining things.

And oh, of course it was Monica who was in there, all alone, reading something in the solitude of what used to be my favorite place on earth. I don't know what had changed in me, especially since the world was just transitioning from spring to summer and it should've looked better, prettier, and greener than ever, but now my former favorite place on earth just looked like the saddest place on earth to me. How about that.

For a second, I just looked at her from the distance, very much in a stalker-y fashion, but she seemed as lonely as I was feeling, so I decided to go talk to her, even if it wasn't the most intelligent thing to do. She was on the same swing she'd sat on all those months ago, with the same leg tucked under her body, thumbing her way through the pages of that book.

"Hey, what're you doing here?" I asked, putting my hands in my pockets, cigarette between my teeth. She looked up at me, surprised, and before she'd formed an answer, I crashed down on the swing next to her, because I was not willing to press my back against the metal post that was holding the whole thing together, just like I'd done lo' those many months ago.

"Oh, um, nothing, really. It's just..." she trailed off, marking the page in her book by folding the top corner. "My mom sent us some stuff, so I came to give Ross a couple of things," she explained, and I nodded. So, it was her voice on the other side of the door, forcing my heavy eyelids to open. Interesting.

"And what are you reading?" I tried to spark some kind of small talk-related conversation, taking a puff of smoke and waving to her book. Monica just lifted it and showed me. East of Eden. I nodded approvingly. "Steinbeck, huh? Nice."

"Yeah, it's actually a book my mom sent Ross," she explained, the world making sense again. No offense to Monica, whom I dearly appreciate, but she'd never been closer to a John Steinbeck novel in her life. "And he insisted, quite vigorously, by the way, that I should read it."

"It's a great book," I conceded, turning my head to blow some smoke out of my mouth.

She nodded at me, smiling, and we inserted ourselves once again into this dynamic where she and I simply forget at the same time that the world keeps turning without waiting for you, and that things are simply not a pretty as we'd like them to be. So we sat in silence for a second. We were not even swinging, we were just swaying over the ground, silently going over the stuff in our heads, whatever it was.

"Hey, when are you leaving?" I asked after a while, the question popping into my head, even though Ross had already informed me.

"In three days," she shortly said, showing me three fingers. I nodded again. "You're smoking again."

"Oh. Yeah," I admitted, because there was no point in denying the obvious. Now it was her time to nod.

More silence. While it lasted, Monica shoved her book inside the bag that had been resting beside her feet on the grass, and I tried to finish my cigarette without making it look like I was rubbing my habit on her face. There was this gigantic elephant dancing its way all over the abandoned swings, and I tried to work up the courage to acknowledge it.

"So, um... should we talk?" I semi-asked, semi-suggested at last, flicking the cigarette butt away.

"Sure," she made a gesture with her hand. "Talk."

Put in the spotlight way too quickly, I blanked. "Well, I'm sorry... for like, everything," I said, feeling extremely inadequate.

"Yeah, you said that already," she quickly answered, making me feel even more extremely inadequate.

"Well, I want you to know it's true," I helplessly said, shrugging my shoulders.

"I know it's true," she said.

And yet, even more silence. I was not accustomed to this. I was not accustomed to awkward silences with Monica, and I was not accustomed to having strained conversations with her that were filled with actual words, but that didn't have any meaning inside them. She was looking at me expectantly now, but I had run out of words already. She seemed resolute. I probably just seemed anxious.

"Can I tell you something random I think?" she twisted around, helping herself with her feet so she could face me. And oh, did she face me; she'd never looked more intensely at me in her life.

"Tell me something random you think," I nodded.

"You're probably not gonna like it," she added, and I braced myself. Still, I nodded. "I mean, you were the one that wanted to talk."

"Tell me anyway, yeah."

She took a deep breath, and I braced myself a little bit more. "I've been thinking a lot about us, y'know, lately," she started. "And I've been trying to figure out what the hell happened, or what the problem was, and even though I'm pretty sure some of this is my fault, too, I've come to the conclusion that the main problem is you," she said, and I tried to find comfort in the fact that things could only go uphill from here. Probably. "And you know why I think this?"

I shook my head no.

"Because I think you have a penchant for self-pity," she continued, still facing me. Downhill, downhill. "I mean, you probably don't realize this, but it looks like you unconsciously enjoy wallowing in it or something, and you have no idea how to cope with things for which you won't be able to pity yourself later, so you'd just rather be miserable in the comfy confines of the familiar, than happy in the uncomfy confines of the unknown."

I was about to say something, only God knows what, but she held up her hand first, wanting to continue with this pseudo-speech that seemed specifically designed to make me feel bad.

"And sometimes it's like you actually believe that you have the exclusive rights of suffering or something," she said, phrasing it like this so-called Suffering was one of my most prized possessions. "Probably because you think that it's the only thing you have, and so that must mean that your suffering is greater than other people's suffering. But that's not actually true," she said, and I don't know why, since she was the one saying bad things about me (albeit kind of true), but she was the one getting madder by the word.

"I know that's not true, Monica," I clumsily defended myself.

"But you don't, not really. I mean, you think you have it so bad, but of course people around you suffer, too. And of course people around you have had crappy childhoods, too. And of course people around you are afraid of admitting things, too. But you don't even seem to realize all that, because you are too self-involved in your own crappiness to do it. You see what I'm trying to say?"

"I think I see what you're trying to say, yes, but I don't really understand why you're saying them," I quietly said, running my fingers through my hair. "I mean, you're just being... cruel. Why are you saying all this stuff?"

"I'm saying all this stuff because I'm mad at you," she reasoned, wording everything like she'd rehearsed this conversation in her head plenty of times already. "And I'm mad at you because things were going incredibly well, even if, who knows, maybe I was just fooling myself, but I definitely know that now everything is ruined, and I definitely know I'm mad at you, okay?"

"Okay, hey, I know," I soothed, trying to calm her down. "I'm mad at me, too."

"But I'm also mad at me, because at first I thought it was all my fault for putting too much pressure on you or something like that. But, y'know, then I thought that you've got a lot of stuff to figure out, and you've got a lot of stuff to figure out about a lot of things, and I don't even know how to help you with that," she kept ranting, perfectly acting like I would in a situation like this one. "I mean, I don't even know what you want!"

She stepped out of the swing then, paced around for a second, and then looked down at me. I thought at the moment that perhaps in a perfect world I would've said I only wanted her, or that without her in my life I was in hell, or that she'd gotten under my skin a long time ago, so fast I hadn't even realized it. But this was no perfect world, and I wasn't perfect myself, and so I just sat there, like a mope with my mouth half-open, waiting for my tongue to magically form the pronouns or the words I desperately wanted to say.

"I'm gonna go, okay?" she said, sort of resolute but on the verge of crying, too, picking her bag off the ground and slinging it over her shoulder. "I can't be waiting for you forever. I'm sorry."

And I don't know how or when or why, but my brain seemed to unfreeze itself for a brief moment, and I got up from my swing and said, "No, please, don't go," and she stopped and faced me again, and I was the one looking down at her now when I said, "I want you, Monica. I'm miserable right now, I think that much is obvious."

And she said, "Jesus, you are just so goddamn selfish," and she did it really slowly and with a surprising calmness in her voice, and yet I still winced, because it was not what I was expecting, and I'll admit it. No such thing as a perfect world, after all. "It's like you want a lot of things, but you won't give anything in return. It's not my job to take care of you, or rescue you, or whatever you think I'm here for, Chandler, and it's incredibly unfair that you somehow think it is."

"I'm sorry," I mumbled what had apparently become the only words in my substantially limited vocabulary.

"Look, about everything you have to figure out..." she said after a beat, swallowing thickly, because she wasn't capable of being mad at me without looking extremely sad, and something inside of me broke, but something inside of me fretted, too. "Just take these months to yourself, or to do whatever you want, or I don't really care. But I think it's probably best if you do it alone, because I can't go home on my own with this burden in my head, and... I don't know," she almost finished, taking a step backwards, her voice wavering a bit. "So, there's that, okay?"

"No, please," I pathetically begged, but she was already leaving. "Monica, c'mon, let's talk this out or something."

"No, I'm sorry, too," she muttered, I don't know if to herself or to my benefit, but I do know that with those words, she made her way out of this place, just like she had eight months ago, only this time she was doing it alone and she was leaving me behind.

And this is not something I'm proud to admit, but when she left me alone, I sat down on one of the abandoned swings, clung to its chains for dear life, and then I cried. I don't know for how long; maybe one minute, maybe thirty. I finally did what I'd been on the verge of doing the whole day, but that I had stupidly repressed and only God knows why.

And the strangest thing is, at first, I didn't even know I was crying. It was like this silent, solitary tear trickled down my cheek without my noticing, but then salt water wetted my lips, and I finally figured out what was happening, because I am that slow. After the revelation, everything was a little more cathartic, though; sobs rapidly rippled through my body as if they were filled with electricity, and tears flowed down my face with surprising ease. I cried, and I cried, and I cried, and I cried like I hadn't cried in my whole life until I couldn't cry any more.

And do you know why? Because Chandler Bing does cry when he thinks he's going to die of love sickness, only he'd never been on the verge of a love sickness-related death before, so there was no way he could know about it.

I hate those three words, and everything they imply. I hate myself for not being able to figure out the obvious out of fear, or ignorance, or just plain cowardice. I hate that I didn't even know what was happening until it was happening, and that for even the shortest period of time, it seemed reasonable to me, as if there was no other choice. I hate that I had just ruined the only glimmer of hope my world had to offer by not being able to say the right thing.

I hate that I am filled with hate.

But I especially hate that now I have to spend these companionless weeks trying to figure out how someone could be as clever as to trick someone like her to fall in love with me, yet be as ignorant as to realize what love was all about seconds after she'd walked out of my life indefinitely.

Fuck, man - In love, I am.


A/N: The line from Beginners is, elementary, my dear Watson: "You make me laugh but it's not funny." I don't know why, but when I thought of bringing back the stupid Moleskine, that line haunted my mind, and then I could not think of anything else, and yeah, it fits, so I'm sorry, Mike Mills, but I stole your brilliant line.

Now that all that is behind us: "In love, I am," said Luke Pritchard from The Kooks, in their beautiful song 'Do You Love Me Still?' I get a lot of inspiration from my fellow Kook friends (I LOVE THEM SO MUCH! /cries into hands), so I think and hope I'll be talking more in-depth about them in the future. Oh, and there's only a couple of chapters left. Woo hoo, I feel accomplished.

But hey, above all, thank you for all the love you left on the last chapter - my delicate heart truly appreciates it!