Sometimes... I enjoy the recklessness. And I hope that everyone enjoys the blossoming of your author for you are receiving the stories that have yet to be told.
Everything is beginning and if you try to transpose what is seen with what isn't, the story is of greater importance than a "fix". A fix through fics is always very selfish, don't you think? Enjoy the transcendence.
I dedicate this readily to the one who knows... enjoy the title. And... this is one of those cases of tomorrow after yesterday's third plateau.
Chapter 12 / Tangelo Black but Lemonade Parade
You know how us catholic girls can be, revelations to men who envy the darkest sins.
How many times they'd taken up residence in his black upholstered shell; how often it seemed that the turning of the tides happened just under the dark side of the moon within the alabaster gleam in his eyes. It was Sunday, a day for childhood stories and afternoon coffees after heavy church luncheons. Today, there were no social meetings or Styrofoam cups, only the pitter patter of the asphalt attacking and counting the merciful miles between here and there, but how tired she became with labeling "today". She only wanted to revert to yesterday while holding onto the idealism of tomorrow. She wanted to forget time all together and coexist with the sovereignty within his eyes.
We all needed something to pray to. Alleluia.
She often times wished to take a hold onto the cushiony wheel and steer them back down the road that took her away so long ago. To be trapped within his arms and tangled in the mess of paisley bed spreads and black leather seemed too far off a dream than the sanity she played Russian roulette with. Why couldn't she return to the simple, adoring child of yesteryear, the one who kissed and could only hope that she'd once again be affirmed that she was just fifteen? Seventeen brought with it the composition that even mathematicians couldn't fathom. Did it always mean more on the off years than the on? Did it always come down to a failing digit that couldn't be divided by mere chance or consequence? She would forever damn the odds while crying with the evens.
"Sometimes," her voice failed her just as seventeen was beginning to fail her. She inhaled and sighed concurrently, arranging the miniature magnetic words on his refrigerator telepathically. "Sometimes, I don't want to be Jude anymore."
He looked to her and said nothing as his course veered off to the sharp left, parking underneath an oak blazing in all of its chlorophyll glory. The ignition was killed and he waited patiently for her words to spring back to life.
"It all seems so worthless, don't you think? I am Jude but what does it mean? Absolutely nothing if you don't count personal definitions."
She spoke with such clarity that it seemed foreign to him. Where had the trembling girl in the café who fought relentlessly to form sentences vanished? Before him sat the prime cut throwing around philosophy as if it were just a breeze to catch on a Sunday afternoon. He tried to clear his throat but the growing tightness only sped up his asphyxiation.
"Tommy, don't you ever get tired of being yourself?"
She eyed him warily; he hanging onto the dusty backdrop like a canvas hung in a fool's precision. She imagined him speaking in the prophecy she'd heard before, but it wasn't before. It was today, a today she was so wary from hearing. At long last, he spoke. Faltered and cracked but still the softest, smoothest, brassiest key for every ancient lock to every Pharaohs tomb.
"Yes," he palmed the keys from the ignition switch, playing an unknown game with the "lock" and "unlock" buttons, "all the time."
She nodded her head in understanding, turning to take in the heavy tree overhead and breathing in the fresh smell of grass and green that enveloped her casually.
"Why do we do it?" She squinted her eyes to the filtered sun, thinking of how aqua-hazel his eyes became at three in the afternoon. "You and me... we could be so much more than 'rock stars', but we still do it. We'll walk into the studio some day soon and we'll work until our voices and fingers are numb, but we are so much more than those stupid records we put out."
She scared him, thinking that their main purpose in life was really so insignificant and futile, but it was like listening to the small violin playing in the background of a World War II documentary. It was the truth filled note between the agendas and the propaganda.
"You weren't meant to be a star, Tommy. You were destined to be something a lot bigger than that. What did you really want to be when you grew up?"
He looked down to his hands, internally laughing at the clunky pewter star ring he wore and how it could really just be sand he was trying to count. He shifted his eyes to her, a hidden, special smile tugging on his lower lip.
"I wanted to be on Sesame Street." He blushed, recalling his childhood fantasies of being inside the television and hugging Super Grover. Super Grover always seemed so happy and lovable, warm and wanting to hug him. "I wanted to hug Grover and talk Oscar out of his trash can. I always thought Oscar was the grouch because no one liked him but I did. I really liked Oscar. I wanted to be his friend."
Jude smiled at the small child in the driver's seat, thinking not of the man who lived up to expectations but the boy looking up to puppets and their feelings. She knew that boy was still under the surface, still idolizing small creatures and wanting to be their friends.
"I think Oscar would have been happy to be your friend." She stretched out her arms, thinking of her own childish dreams and wondering if Tommy would have played with her at seven just as he did at seventeen. "I've always wanted to be a kite."
"A kite? Why?" He turned and contorted his body to sit with his back to the door, marveling at the dreaminess that blurred her face and shoulders. She peered off distantly, smiling in a sort of smudged happiness.
"I wanted to touch the sun." She closed her eyes, imagining her fingers running over the white hot radii. "Have you ever noticed how different the sky looks in winter than it does in the summer?"
He reveled in her stream of consciousness, taking in the lemonade parades and tangerine dreams of her aura and vibrations.
"Yeah... it's bluer."
"You remind me of a January sky, so pretty but so sharp. It's like, if you touch it, you'll cut your fingers."
"You remind me of October and the hay rides I once took when I was really little. You're the little pumpkin they'd let me take home when it was all done, part souvenir, part jack-o-lantern, except... you aren't a souvenir."
She enjoyed him following her down this trip she was taking, how effortlessly he let himself get lost along the way. She enjoyed losing herself with him on the twisting and turning roads of Sleepy Hollow as it turned Halloween. She made up her mind then that he would have played with her and he would have helped her win the pumpkin carving contest between her and the rest of the neighborhood kids; that their pumpkin would have been of kites and Oscars and little tiny stars that sparkled so brilliantly when you dropped in the tea light her mother gave her.
"We should go on a hay ride one day. I've never been on one."
"We are on one, Jude."
She forgot herself in those words, digesting it as she did the pumpkin pie her grandmother made for Thanksgiving and how it always happened before All Saints Day. She sighed at the connotations, turning to look at him fully once more.
"You really are Saint Tommy."
He laughed quietly and sadly at her misconceptions of him.
"Does that make you Saint Jude?"
"I'm no saint."
"Me neither."
They sat in the silence, quietly feeling the dredges of springtime and how the sky would soon melt away into the summer's dog day oblivion. They wished for winter and the creaking bonfires of autumn, wishing to cast the lies they led for lives into the waving oak flames and let the rustic wood smoke settle into their hair. They wanted to return to the days of silly dreams and aspirations, hopscotch and miniscule six year differences. They breathed and dreamed and said Hail Mary's in tandem, thinking that maybe rock stars didn't always have to grow up.