Stardust

Empty Planet

Stardust: Empty Planet

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    The city was very quiet tonight. At least, it seemed that way to Skylar.

    He didn't know if it was all the things in his head tuning life out, or if an otherworldly force pressed the celestial mute button somewhere in the universe. Either way, it didn't make a difference to him. Nothing seemed to make a difference to him anymore except those coveted moments when he inhaled the stars and the whole world looked so magnificent and kaleidoscopic for an hour or two. But the world seemed dull, empty and far too quiet these days.

    Skylar dragged himself down cracked sidewalks, through clouds of festering stenches synonymous with the inner-city alleyways, and passed abandoned yards littered with glass and trash. All of the lights and signs and buildings looked gray. Even the moon seemed to have lost its brilliance somewhere in between all the streetlights and satellites Skylar strayed beneath. He wondered if it was a fault in his eyes, or a fault in his heart. He hoped to whatever divine being presiding over the world that it was just in his eyes, but he had a sick, debilitating notion that this visual lifelessness ran far deeper than him suddenly going color blind.

    That notion was reinforced by the empty, hollow crater he felt in his chest. A crater that swelled, pulling pieces of him into a dark nothingness until there would be not the faintest trace left of him. The only word he could think of to describe the feeling was sadness, and he hated that. He imagined himself swallowing the word into the acidic lake of his stomach, thinking of it as nothing more than seven letters of patheticness and internalized self-pity. And the last things Skylar Glass would ever be were pathetic and pitiful.

    He kept walking, kicking rocks from beneath his worn-out shoes. He decided  to retrace every path he'd ever taken in this town in hopes to fill the crater in his chest with memories. Like the time he dared Ethan to steal a pack of cigarettes from the liquor store on Fourth Street. Ethan got caught and was banned from the store; the owner taped a picture of him behind the cash register and told employees to call the cops if they saw him anywhere near the establishment.

    The memory brought a smile to Skylar's lips. He couldn't help but laugh into the damp air of the Californian December. For a moment, the crater didn't seem so deep anymore.

    Skylar had been wandering the streets, trying to capture memories like the one of Ethan for hours after he walked Jake home. He thought of the walk being too quiet as well. Then all of his thoughts rearranged, forcing the kiss to the utmost part of his once star-drunk frontal lobes.

    He knew in some far, neglected corner of his conscience that Jake had feelings for him. It was hard not to notice the way Jake lit up like the northern lights when Skylar was around. But Skylar would have never thought this far into their friendship that Jake would still carry those feelings around until they combusted into the kiss on Jackie's porch. He thought that part of their relationship was over; in the beginning, it was fine, but at this point Skylar began to worry that it was far more than a crush. He knew Jake would be disappointed of their relationship not advancing into romanticism, and he cared for Jake far too much to see him disappointed. But there was nothing Skylar could do about it. He had never been in love before, not even with Leah, but he knew from experience that if he ever did allow himself to reach the pivotal moment of clarifying adoration in a relationship with someone, that someone would be a woman.

    After that night on his mother's old porch when he was nine years old, Skylar knew he would never be capable of loving a man. Just the thought of it brought about an intense nauseousness in the pit of his stomach. The very same nauseousness he felt the first time he sold "love" to help his mother pay bills. It was his only option; no one was hiring and even if they were, he wouldn't get a paycheck quick enough to save them from being evicted.

    Jackie would never ask or fathom her son to do such a thing despite her own willingness to trade "love" for money, and she didn't know he did. All she knew was that on a Tuesday she was broke and being threatened by the park manager to pay, and on Thursday night Skylar came home with more than half of the lot rent in stained bills in his pocket. He never told her where he got it from, and she never asked. Jackie did recall Skylar violently retching for the entirety of the following month, but even then she still didn't have the heart to ask. It was one of the unspoken understandings holding their relationship together by threads and spiderwebs. And as twisted as it was, if it hadn't been for those understandings, Jackie and Skylar would have been nothing more than perfect strangers with the misfortune of living beneath the same leaky roof.

    A sigh as fragmentary as a dying breath seeped passed Skylar's cracked lips. He hated to admit it, but he was sad. He thought that maybe he had always felt that way, and that he just kept the gaping mouth of emptiness in his chest covered with people and places and stars. Now, he was alone, every place was a lifeless shade of gray, and he couldn't bring himself to look to the sky.

    He just wanted to go home, but he didn't know where that was. It certainly wasn't Jackie's trailer, whose walls were painted with memories he'd rather forget. It wasn't Brennyn's bedroom, especially since he realized that, although she had been one of his "best friends," there was a sneaking untrustworthiness beneath the surface of her skin, lurking there like an infection or a virus. Unfortunately Shannyn was out of the question since she and Brennyn came as a package deal. And he could never call Matt's house "home," what with Matt's parents' strong dislike of anything that even slightly reminded them of Skylar. Then, every minute Skylar spent with Leah, he felt as if he was using her, and he didn't like to feel that way about the only girl he'd ever come close to loving. There was always Ethan, but the trailer he lived in resembled Jackie's too nearly.

    Skylar stopped on the sidewalk outside of the old, defaced pharmacy. He watched a cluster of insects crowd around the warmth of a streetlight, buzzing and flapping their infinitesimal wings in a frenzy. He closed his eyes. He no longer heard the buzzing. Then he tried with every fiber of his existence to picture a place tantamount to home. Surprisingly, he did.

    The night in the field with Jake played through his head like a Super 8 film reel. But he couldn't help but to think that that night wasn't real to him. It felt like a memory from someone else's life, like he didn't know Jake or the field or himself. He remembered being high that night, and now he was the soberest he ever felt. When he was on drugs, he was someone else living a life parallel to his own. He thought that he didn't have a right to remember that night or any others infused with stardust and happiness. But every time he was remotely happy was when he breathed the white powder that made everything okay for a while. He knew that was why the sadness he felt when he was sober was so trenchant, but even then he was too drunk on sorrow to find someone to sell him happiness.

    In a flicker of clarity almost as transparent as the air he breathed or the happiness he felt under the influence of stardust, he thought it was absolutely pathetic that every juncture of his life consisted of being intoxicated by something.

    Skylar shook his head. His feet regained the pace they maintained before. He tried to see some color in the world, but he felt like a comic book character trapped between white pages and achromatic ink. Or like he was stuck in an endless black and white film that would never be worthwhile enough for anyone to see. And even if someone did see it, he was sure his sadness would bleed through the screen like a spilled can of gray paint, and he would drain all of the colors from the world a thousands times over again.

    Unbeknownst to himself and his hapless thoughts, his old sneakers — the ones that steadily blabbed like a pair of old friends when he walked — began to carry him "home," tracing back the route to Jackie's trailer. He imagined the ground being tracked with the illusory prints of every time he walked that route over the passed two years he'd lived in California.

    He remembered the first time he ever walked those streets. It was the summer before his freshman year of high school. Jackie was busy scoping out every man in the trailer park, and when she caught the eye of the old neighbor lady's son, who was only eighteen at the time, she threw ten bucks at Skylar and told him to find something to do with himself away from the trailer. He knew what that meant. He tucked the money in the waist of his shorts and wandered between his neighbors' trailers until he saw the tops of railroad cars peaking over the fence from the abandoned train yard behind the park. He hopped the fence — lodging a splinter in his palm so deeply that it took three days to remove it — and saw, for the first time, the graffiti that painted the railroad cars in colors bright enough to outshine the aurora borealis. Before that, it was as if he'd never seen real colors before. He remembered being high then too, as he traced all of the nearly three-dimensional drawings with his finger tips.

    That wasn't much of a memory at all. It wasn't a significant period in his life, like watching his first child being born or going on the first date with the person he'd spend the rest of his life with, but he knew he was happy in that moment and that was all that mattered.

    He wished, more than anything, that he could see the colors of the graffiti'd rail cars as brightly as he remembered. But as he stood there in the middle of the defunct train yard staring at the once seemingly larger than life Chinese dragon that he knew was supposed to be a vivid blue, all he saw was a stream of gray along the car. The crater in his chest felt a lot bigger.

    Lost among the fault lines of his thoughts and the bends of the railroad tracks beneath his feet, Skylar's childhood was nonexistent. The carefree days of his youth never had a chance between his father being as present as a ghost and his mother's "demanding job." Since he was four years old, Jackie stocked the fridge with cheap, microwavable TV dinners, expected him to learn what roads to take when walking to school, and left him alone in the trailer for days. As he got older, the days turned to weeks. Then the weeks turned to months. He was surprised that the months hadn't turned to years yet. Jackie's clientele consisted mainly of transient truck drivers, and so she spent most of her time with her thumb out on the wayside of interstates and her head bobbing beneath steering wheels as she was driven over state lines.

    In that time, the juvenile mind of the childhood Skylar was beleaguered with the momentous responsibilities of fending for himself, upholding his attendance to ensure that his teachers didn't get suspicious, and keeping the trailer in one piece. He wouldn't have minded so much if it didn't get so lonely. He had Tyler, whose mother — Delila — had been great friends with Jackie since high school, but Delilah entered the same practice as Jackie and would take Tyler with her wherever she went. Consequently, Skylar's only friend was often states away.

    In the field beside the trailer park in Michigan, where an old Ford pick-up truck sat abandoned beneath a weeping willow as old as the planet in the mind's eye of a child, Skylar would sit in what he thought was the middle-most patch of viridian sprigs and watch for eighteen wheelers on the infinite stretch of highway on the other side of the field. When he did see one, he liked to think that Jackie was waving at him from the cab. He would wave back at the illusion of her. Sometimes, although it was rare, the trucks would blare their horns at him, and his immature mind believed wholeheartedly that it was Jackie pulling the chords.

    That went on for years. Skylar would sit in the field every day after school, waiting for a semi-truck to come barreling down the interstate, shaking the whole world in the same fashion that Jackie shook the lives of every person she'd ever met. Even in the dead of winter, Skylar would look for her smile and her wave in the trucks that passed. He remembered a January where the snow storms in Michigan had been particularly bad, but he came to the field anyhow, braving every condition of the niveous season. One day he sat there until he was covered to his hips in snow. It melted into the tattered clothes Jackie had stolen for him from the local Salvation Army, and his skin beneath was red and raw with the beginnings of frostbite. The woman who lived next door, Nancy, saw Skylar from her kitchen window. She ran out into the middle of the field with a wool sweater wrapped around her hands, slipped the large sweater over Skylar's emaciated, skinny body and carried him home. Despite her six kids, Nancy stayed with him until Jackie came home later that night. Of course, when questioned, Jackie lied about her whereabouts. She said she made a quick trip to the grocery store and got stuck in the storm on her way home. Really, she had just gotten back from a drug binge in Ohio.

     No matter how much he wanted to, Skylar could never bring himself to blame Jackie for anything that went wrong in is life. Even when he sat nearly frozen to the field wishing she would climb out of the cab of a passing truck with her arms open wide and the space between reserved for him, he was just glad that his mother was home. And, as much as it angered him, he couldn't find it within himself to blame her for the night on the porch when he was nine years old and she left her new "boyfriend" to babysit him while she walked to the corner store to buy booze. He thought the reason why he couldn't blame her for that night was that he couldn't even tell her what happened. Even though he no longer had to fear the man that threatened to kill him if he told Jackie what happened, he'd grown accustomed to keeping that night's events to himself as to spare Jackie the heartache. It was just another one of their unspoken understandings, he supposed.

    As Skylar climbed over the fence into the back of the trailer park, he thought that maybe Jackie was sad as well. That had to have been why she was always gone. She was trying to find happiness too. And then he thought that maybe the gaping cavern of emptiness in his chest was a genetic defect of mental despondency passed on to him from his mother. One of the things that Skylar craved the most was to not feel lonely anymore, and so he hoped with every tendon and muscle and bone of his composition that Jackie knew the same afflictions he did.

    Skylar had never had a real conversation with his mother before due too her disposition of making every subject a joke. But the sadness he felt as he wandered between the trailers in pursuit of "home" had reached unbearable proportions, and all he wanted to do was ask her if she felt the same beneath her lively exterior.

    For the first time in what felt like years, Skylar's vision wasn't so colorless. He could see the intrinsic brightness of red and blue lights slicing through the gray tones of the park, weaving between the trailers and jalopies until they reached into Skylar's head and stung the back of his eyes with their potency.

    He shielded his eyes until he rounded the last bend in the road of the trailer park.

    It felt as if the rotation of the planet and every clock hand in all the world had slowed down. When Skylar took his arm from his eyes, all of his neighbors were standing on their porches, eyes wide and whispers sprouting from their tongues and dangling from their teeth like grapevines reaching from trailer to trailer like an untamed garden of counterfeit care. He followed the imaginative path mapped by their "concerned" stares.

    Four police cars and an ambulance sat before Jackie's trailer. So many uniforms and and badges ran in and out of the trailer in a blur, as if the trailer were a revolving door. Skylar was nearly blinded by the red and blue lights of the police sirens reflecting on the badges.

    Beneath the neighbors' chatter and the wailing sirens, Skylar could hear his mother's old record player humming what he recognized as her favorite song, "This Guy's in Love with You," coming from the cracked kitchen window. He remembered the first time he'd ever heard her play it. It was his fifth birthday. No matter what, even if they were broke and she felt like she should have been "working," she never missed a single one of his birthdays. That year, she borrowed twenty dollars from a neighbor and when Skylar heard the summer soundtrack of every childhood — the high-pitched jingle of the ice cream truck — Jackie ran outside and bought one of every ice cream on the menu. They sat on the living room floor for hours eating until their heads were frozen, and dripping the ice cream that melted into technicolor rivers on the carpet. Then Jackie put the record on. Skylar had never seen her smile as wide as she did when she swayed to the melody, dancing her bare feet through the mess of ice cream on the carpet. In a swift glide across the living room, she scooped Skylar up from the floor. She hugged him so tight in her arms, like he was the most precious thing she'd ever touched and there was no way she would ever let him go. Then she flew around the room like a hummingbird, twirling and dipping and laughing. She had never looked more alive. There was a passionate flame behind her eyes that Skylar only caught in brief glimpses after that day.

    Suddenly, all of the uniforms and all of the badges stopped. They stood, collected like a line of toy soldiers in the front yard. Two paramedics wheeled Jackie out of the trailer on a stretcher. Her head lolled to the side. Her eyes were open, seeming to stare right at Skylar. They looked so dead, and he knew that he would never see that fire in her eyes ever again.

    When one of the paramedics zipped the bag over her face, Skylar saw all the colors and reflections of the sirens drain into a sickening, lifeless gray that was even more severe than the colorlessness he had seen before.

    The cavern in Skylar's chest swelled as wide as the Pacific tide. With nowhere else to go, he succumbed to the dark despondency he tried so hard to mask with momentary happiness. And for the first time since he was nine years old, he cried. He cried because he would never know if Jackie felt the same sadness that he always did, and that made him feel the lonliest he'd ever felt in his whole life.

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