Chapter 4: A Lizard Reveals Hisself
he didn’t know what he didn’t know…
”well that’s a cop out. maybe you were just garbage.”
an anguished tetris game, turned heartfelt reminiscence, turned self-assessment has let him to a self-deprecating revelation.
He continues to clack away on the keyboard, doing better than ever. better than ever in the game, that is.
he traces his mind further down the timeline. what happened next…
”we met…she went to ithaca…i felt cloistered…we broke up…”
of course. the breakup. but how final was it?
”we orbited each other…even kissed each other just because we missed it…”
classic.
”…oh fuck. then we saw each other at that concert.”
about a year and a half after the breakup, he saw her at a concert at his college. ithaca was an hour away, so it was not the most unlikely scenario, but he didn’t expect to see her there, understandably.
He looked over to his left and she was already looking at him, practically wincing in anticipation, with her hand half raised. she was with another boy, who was wearing the same exact shirt as he.
they exchanged the most surface level of pleasantries with awkward smiles, and for the rest of the night he couldn’t stop looking to his left every 14 seconds.
he left the concert, pushed away from the friends he went with, and grabbed a hoodie along with a pack of cigarettes from his dorm.
his smoking habit was barely that - less of a habit and more of a strategic and occasional form of self deprecation or toxicity.
he sent her a scathing, nonsensical text, acting like she engineered this serendipitous crossing of paths to hurt him for no reason at all.
he pushed into the woods just outside of his college, put the hood up, and ventured as far as he could into the woods. the orange glow at the end of the cigarettes was his north star.
”i still don’t really understand my reaction…”
he didn’t know what he didn’t know, and it appears he still doesn’t. what’s evident is that knowing why he reacted that way will take more than coasting through an endless tetris marathon.