2019-09-06 - Post-Meltdown Analysis

August is now splitting his time between the cabin and Eleanor's place. A night or two a week with her; sometimes more, if he can swing it. He finds he can manage as much as three days a week, if he spaces them out so the sounds of the town don't pile up and trigger a reaction. The weight of Their attention continues to wane, and he (they) continue to heal.

As he's lying in bed next to Eleanor, he thinks back to the day's various ups and downs. One in particular stands out. So he reaches out, mind drifting towards Elm street, seeking violin music among a swirling maelstrom of activity: Itzhak.

<<Hey.>>

Itzhak has had a long, LONG damn day, and a long damn night. He's laying sprawled face-down on the bed, one arm and one leg draping over the edge. He needs to go back to Bex's place before he falls asleep, but he's relishing the quiet and familiarity of his tiny mother-in-law basement. Brick and battered third-and-fourth-hand furniture and the scent of his own blankets and the sound of Iris's waterfall softly burbling. Small. Humble. The way he grew up, the way he's always lived. And most importantly for the moment, alone.

His mind is spiky around the edges, bristly-prickly, the massive complex shapes of his thoughts turned just enough the wrong way that they don't fit together quite right.

August's mind touches his, and he replies in a plaintive little violin whine.

<<Hey>>

The forest is quiet and dark, maybe in automatic response to Itzhak's need for respite. The burned trees are hard, dark shadows against a starry, tranquil sky, the river reflects the arm of the galaxy overhead in rippling waves. New growth spreads all around in defiance, small trees and ground cover muted versions of their daytime selves.

August can relate to the need for one's own space. You don't live alone for almost two decades and just get over it, no matter how much you're falling head over heels for someone. Especially people like them.

<<I can leave you alone, if you need me to.>>

<<S'okay.>> Itzhak's presence picks up a little, violin singing and murmuring as he takes a moment to soak in August's mental landscape. <<Aww.>> The whisper of his voice is hushed pleasure at the new growth. <<You're so pretty.>>
August's mental laugh is a gentle ripple along the river, a shudder in the trees as the violin music weaves through them. There's a brief flicker of an image of...someone asking to touch his hair?

He brushes it aside.<<So are you.>>

A quiet pause, then, <<Sorry, about earlier. You were having a tough time and I wasn't being very understanding about it. You doing better?>>

<<Sorry? Sorry for what?>> Itzhak says with that characteristic blankness. Thoughts pop to the surface of his mind, turn around, get slotted together. <<...Oh. That. Meltdown. Sometimes they happen like that. I kicked a dumpster until somebody yelled at me that they were calling the cops.>>

He's embarrassed, but resigned, as his music wends (he's wending today, not ringing) along the river, tasting the char of the burned trees.

<<You don't have to be sorry. I mean, you're right. Talking like that is like saying Isolde likes trash, or...something. I think that's what you meant.>>

August is clearly puzzled at the notion of caring that someone's kicking a dumpster. It's just a dumpster. He doesn't emphasize that thought or give it proper form, though. He's long since given up parsing other people's priorities, aside from a simple binary categorization that goes something like, 'Do I think that's stupid, or not?'

<<Partly that, partly, getting that upset about your crush being with someone is unintentionally not a great thing to say about your other lovers. Like, what are they, chopped liver? That sort of thing. I don't think you think that, but it's the logical conclusion to a thought like 'well he's with someone my world is now over'.>>

He pauses here a bit, to let the two of them wend. That same, tired happiness seeping into him; Ellie's keeping him busy.

<<But I didn't need to point that out right then. You needed a second to get it out. Grieve, basically.>>

Itzhak's tired too, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Finally. Apparently it takes a week or two of attending to his girls, a morning getting beaten on by Joey Kelly, a night at the strip club, getting his heart a little broken for no reason over Alexander, and finally some capping memory of a late-late dinner with de la Vega and Kelly to ACTUALLY wear the guy out. When usually his presence has half a dozen cravings, for cigarettes or a stiff drink or a stiff dick, right now he's quiet, brain idling in neutral.

(He went out with those two? Yeah, seems he did.)

He offers August something in the link...the experience of melting down, although he mutes it carefully. Static and emotions firing without sense and a screaming urge to freak the fuck out in every direction. August has sensed it coming on him before and was able to calm him, but this time, when Itzhak saw the way Alexander and Isabella kissed, the shock of grief couldn't be stopped.

His reaction was adolescent heartbreak, but adolescents feel things in ways adults have forgotten.

<<Brain's broken,>> he says, simply, after that.

August sighs, a little sad, offering something back. There's a sense he's younger--a lot younger, maybe not even 30. And things happen and his brain wants to react in the most ludicrously out of proportion manner possible. Especially negative things. None of his behaviors work now. They've all been dialed to function in another time and place, honed to razor sharpness by a fight to survive that's not real anymore. A guy at a bar is a bit rude, and he gets slugged. Someone cuts him off, and he feels a real urge to road rage. And so on.

<<You're not broken. That's broken. Injured, really. Scarred.>> A faint suggestion that after prison? Sure--he could call what that did broken. No argument from August there. This, though, this isn't broken. It's being different. Tuned differently, like a guitar specially tuned to its owner's specifications. Other guitarists won't know how to make it sing. They'll think something's wrong, but they're the ones who're wrong. The guitarist who tuned it knows it for what it is.

<<So you're not tuned the same. Just means you have to know how you are tuned, work with that. It's not easy, but that's what the rest of us are for.>>

Itzhak likes that analogy. <<Like Cajun tuning.>> His mental music shifts an entire step down, plays something lively in a more resonant, lower tone. <<Played in that tuning a lot in the band.>> A memory of a pair of Cajun brothers, all sauce and swag. More memories come attached to the idea of being 'tuned differently'; a parade of counselors and special-ed teachers and similar types, telling him he couldn't act like himself because people didn't like how he really was. He couldn't touch things too much or taste them or spend enough time arranging them to his liking. Unallowed, because he was different. His hands had to be quiet. He had to be quiet. He wasn't permitted to run from things that were too loud or too scary. And he just failed at it over and over and over and over.

He resonates himself with the images August shows him of unchecked rage, itself tuned to a different harmonic, one that the rest of the world doesn't play along with anymore. Oh boy, does he know that one.

August takes in the music, the memory of the Cajun brothers. <<Those look like good memories.>> He says this the way he might compliment Itzhak's taste in cars or his furniture; things which mark a person, and yet can still be ephemeral, ever shifting. Artifacts of where and who he's been, can still be again.

<<Yeah it was bad, before the counseling.>> A few more broken images; arguments with loved ones, broken things in a room which is ostensibly his, except for how he's never had his own room; he went from the mobile home park to the Army to this space his parents made for him to heal in, and he was getting worse.

Not-good memories, but useful for marking who he wasn't, like all Itzhak's counselors and their wrong opinions. A distinct flavor of 'fuck those assholes' greets all of that. Even if it was considered 'how to properly have an autistic child' it was still garbage.

<<Still here, though.>> It all fades back to the healing forest. There's a black shape on the horizon, a sprawling crater that sits as a silent, dark reminder of just how bad it could be. Unassailable and somehow beautiful despite what it was, what it meant. <<Something happened and it set you off. It's okay. You got through it, didn't even embarrass yourself in front of anyone.>>

<<Lotta good there. Jean-Paul was front man, his brother Pascal on guitar or banjo. Guy on accordion, another Jewish guy named Sandy. Me on strings, of course. I'd switch off to mandolin too. Sometimes another guy would come in on the rubboard or spoons, mostly we did percussion by stomping on stuff.>> Itzhak rambles quietly, memories flickering through the link.

<<I built a suitcase kick drum with a real bass head, drilled a portal, had two pedals with one on tamb so Paskha could sit on it and work 'em both while playing. He could do harmonica at the same time but mostly JP did that. You never seen a guy who could rock a harmonica like him. Whole band was built on him, he was just amazing. Eventually their ma got sick and they went back to Louisiana.>>

That memory's sad. Itzhak had had a fantastic time as the spitfire fiddler for a rollicking Cajun band. When the Cajun boys said goodbye and left New York (after a rowdy multi-day bender, where the memory makes it clear that Itzhak and Jean-Paul were something more than bandmates), he moped. This was after Ignacio had dropped out of the racing scene, too, and Itzhak was so lonely that he physically hurt.

He'd even thought about following them to Louisiana, pulling up stakes and resettling in the bayou. He could have spent his days learning from the people who invented the music. Ultimately, he didn't, for the usual reasons a person doesn't uproot their life, and would regret it on and off in the usual way.

The sense of a smile comes through from him when August sends him disdain for the autism 'behavioral therapy'. He sends back strong appreciation that August is on his side for that one, and the memory of trying to find a thin spot in the border between worlds by literally licking it. It hadn't worked, but he was so happy he'd tried.

<<You were pretty mad at me,>> he sends, a little pensive, in response to not embarrassing himself.

August meanders through the memories as Itzhak shares them, like a patron in a museum; his smile at the music is a laughing, dancing, clapping crowd. He's unsurprised to see this about Itzhak and JP; Itzhak falls in love easily. Of course a man like that would set his heart on fire. Maybe in some ways August envies that; he's too guarded, too insular, too withdrawn. Not without good reason, yet despite the security provided it has his drawbacks.

A sad sigh for the other life Itzhak didn't live. It was a unique sort of grief; that mourning for what could have been, that was given up for what is. Bittersweet, tantalizing, a small trail in a deep wood that's hard to explore sometimes, though you know it can't go anywhere useful. Sometimes you just want to look, and wonder what's in the undergrowth.

The sight of Itzhak licking the air produces a laugh that echoes around in the dark forest night. <<You licked it. Of course you did.>> It's less a laugh at Itzhak, and more at the absurdity of their lives now. What was that about paths not taken? On that path, he's a fiddler in a Cajun band; on this one, he licks the Veil to find a thin spot.

<<I was.>> He cops to his anger with a distinct note of apology and without prevarication. <<Didn't want to see you march down to Elm and make a huge mistake with Isolde by saying something you would regret.>> He echoes back that feeling of loneliness from the memories of the Cajuns departing. August is acutely aware of how hard that drives Itzhak, can't not see what it does to him. And he knows, oh how he knows, what it's like to act on a desparate instinct that's born out of pain, and what it winds up costing (too much).

Itzhak does fall in love easy, too easy; he's rueful, which tastes like flat, plain seltzer water in the link. <<I...mighta done,>> he admits. <<I want to say I wouldn't, but I fucked up too many other times, I know better.>>

He shows August. Alexander had kissed Isabella like Itzhak wishes he'd kiss him, and Isabella (gorgeous, brilliant, well-educated, bouyant and unafraid and clearly not autistic) had watched him walk away with hungry anticipation. Itzhak even shares the surge of jealous fury that had boiled up in his belly, whiting out all sense and reason. Sharing it makes it better, somehow, makes it hurt less, makes it less of a monster inside him.

<<If Alexander was into Finch, or even Nacio or you, I'd be mad, but...>> He doesn't have words, and hey, he doesn't need them. He can just feel it and let August feel it too. If Alexander was into a person more like him, more like the people he spent his time around, he'd have been cranky but accepting. It's that Isabella is such a radiant cut above him, a person who he perceives as bewilderingly, objectively perfect.

He's grateful August could be angry enough to try to steer him right, and he shares that too. August knows what it's like to have those reactions, to be all too willing to throw away empathy and logic and go for the throat. They both lived lives that hammered that rage into them, through no fault of their own, and now they have to cope with it.

August feels bad for suspecting Itzhak might have done that, but at the same time, he'd far rather be here, apologizing for that, instead of having Itzhak call much later to say he'd gotten into a horrible fight with Isolde. There it was: better him be at fault than Itzhak. He can deal with overstepping his bounds and asking forgiveness. (Though he's still glad that Itzhak's not furious at him for that.)

<<Don't regret it too much. The other end of it's no fun. I'd almost rather it.>> Almost. He was used to the walls now, comfortable in them. Sometimes people snuck through. In the overall, that was better for him, given how he was.

<<You'd feel like he might still want you, some day, if it was one of us. But because it's not, it feels like you could never be good enough. There's no hope, no possibility.>> He's thinking of someone else, numerous someones, except in effect he's not. A soft sigh.

And he can sympathize with that jealousy all too well. How often had someone he wanted in college gone/been with someone else, and he'd felt nothing but overwhelming frustration? Because at the end of the day, what did he have to offer compared to the average 20-something? He's scarred up and can be stand-offish, can't go near a hospital, can barely stand to live in a town the size of Gray Harbor (and he still managed to put himself out in the forest). That war lives on inside him, always will, a mark that some people can sense. Who's going to want that when they can not put up with those things, and avoid a guy who sometimes seems a little odd, a little different, for the Glimmer running through his veins?

It does make it better, at least for August. The sigh becomes a breath of hope weaving over the landscape. Seen this way, the reaction isn't monstrous. It's mourning. A loss that leaves them angry and wanting to lash out as well as cry in a corner. An emptiness, an affirmation of loneliness.

August shrugs that last bit aside, because ultimately, it's untrue. IsoldeRebeccaEleanorFinchIgnacioJulia, they all parade by in a long line. Yes, the loss of more was unfortunate. But it wasn't everything, even though the anger they've been trained to answer says it is (because everything is worth being mad about after prison or a war).

Sometimes Itzhak feels like he'll always be lonely and it'll always hurt, that no matter how many friends or lovers he might have, nothing will ever soothe the scars on his heart. Sometimes he wonders if he's genuinely open about his relationships or if he's just trying to find as many people as possible who will tolerate him. He doesn't show those thoughts explicitly to August, but they're right there, impossible to miss, the violin of his thoughts singing them achingly to the burnt forest and the stars.

Ugh, and here he is feeling sorry for himself again when he gets to date Isolde and, uh, not-date Rebecca. Seriously, Rosencrantz, is this how you're gonna act?

<<This's why I like talking to you,>> he murmurs, finding words. <<You get it.>> His attention turns to the blasted, silent, dark cone on the horizon, a shape with its own mathematical grace. <<If you didn't care, you wouldn't be mad at me for being a yutz. Don't think I don't know that. You're beautiful, you know,>> he adds, returning to what he'd first said tonight. <<All scarred and messed up and still standing. Doing what you can with your life. That's amazing and so many people just don't get it.>>

August can relate to that concern, even though he also knows that's Itzhak can find, hasfound, people who will tolerate him. He's talking to one right now! But scars ache, sometimes, or they itch, or they burn, or they pull. That's just how scars are. Like any other reminder, they had their good days, and their bad.

<<It's okay if that gets to you sometimes. It's going to. Just have to not make decisions when you're like that. Act in ways that don't lash out at people.>> If he feels this is Itzhak feeling sorry for himself, well, he doesn't express that explicitly. There's mostly a gentle feeling of, 'maybe banging two hot girls who get you isn't the worst it can be'.

He accepts the compliment of caring, even as he mitigates it with, <<I can probably do better. Fortunately Ignacio was there.>> Ignacio, who had a wavelength on which he could more carefully explain to Itzhak that he was being a putz and should consider stopping.

<<Flatterer.>> August's usual response to compliments remains the same as always. <<I'm glad at least a couple of you think so. Coming from you that pretty nice, handsome man like yourself.>> Before Itzhak can deny that, he adds, <<Don't sell yourself short.>>

Itzhak grins stupidly into his pillow. Banging two hot girls yes indeed. A ripple of memory shivers under his music. He keeps it from surfacing, but what he's remembering is pretty obvious (sweet mouths on his and soft skin under his roughened hands and--).

Not the worst by a long way. In fact, pretty damn good. He knows his fortune. His heart is just screwed up and lame and dumb. He hates that he gets like this.

<<Please, like you don't have your pick.>> Of course he has to tease August back.

Reluctantly he rolls off the bed, stands up and stretches. He can touch the low basement ceiling when he does.

<<Gotta get back to Bex's. Thanks for lookin' in on me, huh?>>

A low rumble of amusement rolls between them. <<I don't need my pick.>> A brief image of Eleanor, in a plaid shirt of his, and though it's indistinct and not showing him anything specific Itzhak can plainly tell she's not wearing, well, much of anything else. <<She picked me instead. I like it better that way. Felt pretty amazing.>>

A moment of soothing reassurance. Though August doesn't make it specific, it's easy to discern the overall theme of his thoughts. Everyone has bad days. Nothing irreversible happened. You're okay. The last one is the most important of those, of course.

Back to one of his hot girls. (August doesn't harass him with that thought.) <<Any time. Take care. Be careful.>>