And Secondly;

[Harpalyce]

(Just playing around with second person.)

----

So.

It's still raining properly but you don't care because the big, fat raindrops are slowing in tempo. Pretty soon it will be hard for you to tell when it's drizzle and when it's just especially thick fog. Your glasses are already fogging up in the heat, but you don't move to wipe them. It'd just make the world smudgier and blurrier. And so you walk back to your car with your hoodie pulled up to try and keep out the rain, even though this mummifies you in your own sweat. You convince yourself that it's worth it.

Steam is on your glasses, steam is rising from the roads like you accidentally moved into a sauna, steam is in your car. It doesn't seem possible that the inside of your car is even more sticky and humid than the outside, but it is. The car, however, has a max AC button. The outside does not. So you reach out and let your fingers run through the streams of chilly air, and you sit, and you stare at the car's dashboard. You haven't moved it out of P into D yet.

Past the new shopping center is a bit of woods that cushions the neighborhood behind it. In the new shopping center is the store that you have just exited. You remember when it wasn't a store. It was pine trees and a ravine with red clay banks and poison ivy that you found one summer, because your best friend used to live in that neighborhood. And in that ravine was a creek. Barely that - you could jump it, if you really tried, and it wasn't deep. But it was enough for tadpoles. It was enough for you to beg to go play in your friend's backyard. It was enough that you gathered up all of your toys and set off making them have a grand adventure and your mother came for you before they had reached their destination but they were all covered in mud (including you) and that was enough to have her forbid you from playing in the creek. Though you still did.

In high school as a moody teenager you came back with your cheap camera to make what you thought was art. You dressed all in black and wore a scowl and just dared anybody to call the police on you so you could prove them wrong by being perfectly innocent. Nobody noticed, though. It was just you and the creek. There were more empty soda cans and plastic grocery bags than you remembered, but you took a picture of one in black and white and said something very serious in class about how it was a metaphor for loss of innocence and then you got an A. But after that picture you had walked along the stream because you realized you didn't know where it flowed from. You expected maybe a larger creek, something that flowed to or from the wide, noble expanse of the silt-brown river that you only got a clear view of when it was flooding. Or something wondrous, like a spring, like Niobe weeping for her children.

You found the wide gaping mouth of a concrete pipe.

The creek never seemed as magical as it had before.

You still haven't put the car into gear, though the motor purrs expectantly, waiting for you to release the parking brake and get going. Instead there's the steam rising from the pavement: the summer shower is almost over. You have forty dollars worth of exercise videos and equipment riding in the passenger seat, and five more dollars of a milkshake sitting in the drink holder. You will taste it and enjoy it but realize it is nowhere near as good as you remembered before. It is nowhere near the first time you went to the new dessert cafe. It is certainly nowhere near the time your grandfather took you and your cousins on a tour of a local creamery and you were served a chocolate milkshake in a plain styrofoam cup at the end of the tour by a smiling woman in a hair net. And although you enjoy it, you are also disappointed, because you spent almost half your week's paycheck in one outing, and that night it will seem like forty dollars of workout instructions don't cancel out five dollars of milkshake and the thirty-five dollars of guilt to go along with such a treat.

You wonder if this is what growing up feels like. It's been so gradual, you hadn't really noticed, not before now.

You have never felt so tired in your entire life.

And you put the car into drive and head home.

[Sharubii]

Hot damn Harp, that's really good! Second person has never been a strong point of mine, so I have to give you serious kudos for writing this so well. c:

[Harpalyce]

Why thank you :B I am glad you like it!

[tanner]

I loved it. very well written =3

[Harpalyce]

Thank you! :>

[Harpalyce]

Another little quick blurb.

-----

It started with the little things, like how he would leave the sink on while brushing his teeth. It was a little thing, you told yourself. You could get over it. You weren't petty. You were modern and open-minded and you would make this work. Then the little things became the big things. Or were leaving dirty dishes all for you and that annoying snore at night little things? You can't tell anymore. He caresses his game controllers more intimately than you these days.

Both of you know it is over and both of you are cowards, because neither wants to say it. This usually involves tears and fighting, maybe a friend coming over at midnight to help you move out while you scream at each other and ensure nobody gets sleep because if you are miserable, everyone else should be miserable, too. But he's doing it again - that thing where when he's bored, he swishes his own spit between his teeth, staring out with a dumb, passive, cow-like expression at the road while you're driving.

So maybe right now you can be brave.

"We need to talk."

"About what?" He drawls, and then goes back to what he was doing. Swish-swish, squish-squish.

"About us."

The words hang in the air like the tree-shaped air freshener that bobs on your rear view mirror as you hit a pothole. "Are you breaking up with me?" He says, sounding incredulous.

"Yes," you say, because there's really no getting around it.

"Oh."

You wonder if he has always used that dismissive tone on you before, or whether it is just now. Maybe he has always looked down on you like this, like that one little syllable allows you to know. That subtle disdain... why hadn't you noticed it before? Maybe you just weren't listening hard enough...

"Can we still go to the movie, though? I mean," he half-whines, "we have tickets."

You're brave, but not brave enough to drop him off at the nearest bus stop. And besides, he's right. You have tickets. You are practical, if nothing else, you suppose. At least you call it practicality. You don't know if it's that or cowardice.

"Yeah, we're still going to the movie."

[Harpalyce]

Any more thoughts on these two, y'all?