A lazy feeling that even a paradise-in-this-world would be a chore was stapled somewhere onto their souls. I don’t know, there was an aggravated sense of pointlessness. Even the hobbies became little bags of sand, like tethers. Teenagers and young people used to wanna float like dandelion blossoms across fields, with only a faint smell of asbestos in the schools. But that was the past. A long time ago. A crazy past where tropical villages burned and leather meant something. A time of parents and television sets and stiff upper lips. The young people didn’t know what to do with this past. They might play its records, watch its movies, buy its lasting décor, but that was merely mischief. Buying what the old scorned. A doctor, if also part philosopher, would have said “terminal future-death” or perhaps “hope deficiency.” It was adulthood but it felt like daycare. It was civilization but it felt like decadence. It was freedom but it felt like disappointment.
They’d given up music, they’d given up seed oils, they’d given up liquor, they’d done juice cleanses and no-fap challenges, they’d sent no text messages and they’d tried sending even more, to breaking point. Weaned off screens and cure-by-exposure. Exercise one week and wake-and-bake the next. One boy (he was 28) had even taken to writing letters, in a baby-like handwriting that would have been an embarrassment to an age with better habits. He’d cachet the messy pages, address them to grandma and pop them in the mailbox, taking a moment to place both hands on the upper sides of the mailbox like on a pinball machine and tap his fingers rhythmically to some song or another. He’d serenade them as they began their journey to a woman who did remember what an open-sky meant, whose life had been event and symbol, one after the other. What tune was he silently playing? It could have been something streamed recently, or something heard in the cradle, when mum had slid the CDs innocently into a bright silver player, one way or another programming its way into his limbs. These were grown boys, who’d squeezed themselves on dating apps between pictures of leg-day and salmon fishing in the hopes of getting laid. Their lives had been lived as fully as a narrow life can be. Some of them read, but each book was a revelation, not a continuity. They were a little bit pink, a little big too taut, they were reality’s pursed lips on a hot day. Haircuts glistened with product. Clothes hung indifferently on their bodies. Their diffidence matched only their irritation at the world, which was nevertheless manic-depressive, which nevertheless seesawed between investment schemes and online fads, between blaming oneself and blaming the world. They squirmed between sameness, activity, and boredom, under the 24h glow of a screen.
Some of the girls, too, lived in the absence of the good life that, for them, showed up in the aristocratic Tarot-deck tattoos wrapping their way around pale arms. The blue ink
was punctured gleefully into their bodies, both seething with bovine growth hormones and sedated with coffee. Each one lamented the decade in her own way. Some with pep others with a long, bitter face. Ultimately their path contained fewer outbursts and less violence, although it was poignant, too. Their young beauty was a kind of suffering that rhymed less with school-shootings than with weeping on the city bus late at night, maybe in the rain. Their attentions flitted from this to that. Birth-control pills vied with iron-deficiencies as the culprit of a term-less low mood that was really a little shard of the century buried within each of them like an icepick. These illnesses were a kind of inner anxiety that could never be shaken off, almost a water-log effect. This malaise was burrowing deep, so persistently that diet, sex, athletics, passion, prowess, or acclaim could not dislodge it. These were the washed up young women who, for their accounts and pages, scraped their soft melancholic insides out like artichoke hearts, plopping those morsels onto milkware plates with pointy 50s patterns, all the while remaining green, scaly, almost jurassic vegetables that timidly nodded to each new horror as it burst from the screens and streams. High rates of this and that. Their dark hair, separated by bangs, trailed below necklaces and badges and buttons, lapped over interested, inquisitive, and expensively acquired retro fabrics. They could have been decorated with hickeys or worry lines, it all said the same thing. They were to their potential what skim milk is to whole.
Frances saw someone from across the car-park. From across the urban car-park that had such a sweet smell of hotdogs and motor oil. He sat there like in a movie, with no tears, with no fears and no dreams. Or so it seemed to her. He seemed at once young and middle-aged. Youth is in the heart after all. (Cont’d)