hope rising

It's not "I want it now," Oscar thinks to himself. Not defensively, but with counsel, with determination. His reasoning is that for it to be instant gratification, he'd have to have only just then thought of it. He'd have to have, if not routinely possess, an utter lack of judgement and absolutely no patience at all.

(With Felix, every moment is the blink of a thousand years. Every day in tumult and tedium alike slips right through his callused fingers, no matter how much clutter there is or isn't strewn about.

Felix is just so much.

It's possible that Oscar could, by this same thread, justify the whims of yesterday, just based on the despondent knowledge that he'd had to wake and greet today with them worming their way through his limbs, around his brain, up his throat and down to his soul.)

He can see it - can envision it -, though not with speech or logic. Oscar can almost put his hand on whatever it is that he's missing, on the part of Felix that he most needs to touch but cannot, does not, should not, will not.

(It's a concern of access, and wholeness. Actually, he needs all of Felix. That's what's missing.)

He struggles to accept what - or whom - he's fighting with, as well. That's where the rationale comes in, the idea that Oscar Madison could not possibly be so horribly tormented by machinations of his mind that bear no relation nor reflection to the reality unraveling in front of him. It must be real.

No, no, he has moved on from diffident denial. Very nearly, he has moved on from attempting to describe it, to wind into words what defies all description and writhes just out of reach.

An entire life, half of which he is already living. The concept lifts hard-worn lines from his face, on their way to weathering.

Right here. He - no, they, both of them - are right here. Right there. Almost there.

And they have been for three, five, years. How long will they go on...?

Oscar doesn't want pure mindless pleasure. He just wants the torture to end and the bliss to begin.

He doesn't want, with the telling, and the talking, and the considering Felix's feelings and whatever crazy things he might do if tried.

It makes perfect sense in his head. No it doesn't. Yes it does.

(Felix loves him. No he doesn't. Yes he does.)

How could anyone live like this? With this grim and guttural predicament perpetually gnawing, gnawing, gnawing, never allowing even an ounce of conscious peace?

Beyond gnawing, to gnashing and grinding. Sleep has ceased to be a silent escape.

Unconsciously, Oscar inches toward his doom. He is obsessively consumed by Felix's voice calling to him in the mornings, Felix's notes nattering at him via paper or personal intermediary in the midday, Felix's various and sundry noises bound into a matrix of eveningtime esoterica, midnight minutiae.

When Felix goes on trips, the apartment lapses back into its pre-docent days; the fridge becomes a display case for bodega abandonware, and the carpet acquires several new small stains that the upright caretaker would have scrubbed out with immediacy, saving the imaginary security deposit long departed.

Visually, Oscar fails to map the disarray into boxes distinct from the décor that he'd never chosen. Aurally, however, the lack of Felix's characteristic sounds is maddening - Oscar has never cared much for either the presence or the absence of sound, but this...it's like being in a clean room. Oh, destitution, the palatial quiet.

(Felix will not touch him, no. But Felix will continue to talk.)

One wouldn't think of Oscar as a worrier, would they? One would never suppose that his emblematic ulcer were caused by anything other than simple and profane mistreatment of the body instrument he'd been gifted some fifty-three years ago.

But Oscar worries. Oscar cannot contrive to live without the close (that is to say, closer, closest) coexistence of Felix, Felix, Felix.