xp_communication | SMS to Morgan, Letter to Kevin

x-quebecois.livejournal.com posting in

Leaving the mansion for a bit. Will be in NYC. If you are able, would you remove the liquor from my suite, please? It is all in the living room. Merci.

***
Kevin,

You gave me drawings, but I am no artist, and so I thought to give you something else. I am not a writer, not really. I know language, some would say, but I cannot make poetry. So I will give you a story. Not equal, I think, to what you have given me, but something, at least.

-JPB

***
There once was a boy. This is how many stories start, yes? But this boy, he was not so special. He was young and very skinny, likely underfed – and he was angry. Very angry. He liked to think that the world conspired against him. For the most part, though, it is that the world took no notice of him at all. This is what upset him the most.

So this boy, with his knobby knees and scabbed elbows, he decided to run away from home. He did not think, did not plan, of course. Young boys never do. He took only his jacket and his backpack with him when he left school. The parents did not care, they did not look for him. The teachers were glad to be rid of him. He was not such a nice boy to have in their classes, you see. The boy did not like reading or writing – he was not good at them. There were words he did not understand and no one thought to explain them to him. He had no friends amongst his classmates to share his secret with, and so after the bell rang, he walked away.

It was only down the street, but it felt like a million miles. There was a hole in the toe of his shoe and it began to rain in the evening, but he refused to go home. He was hungry, lunch seemed like a very long time ago, but he had saved himself a candy bar of some kind, more chocolate than anything else, and so he had that for dinner whilst sitting on the stoop of a door many blocks from his school.

The neighbourhood he went to, it was not so good. It took him a very long time, it seemed, to learn the things he would need to know to survive. Older boys, also runaways, stole his backpack. They did not want his shoes, they said, because their own were better. His jacket was too small for them, but they took it from him anyway. They burned it to see if the fibres would colour the flames differently. It was not a good fire and so it died shortly thereafter, but the jacket was gone.

Going home, it was not an option. No one was looking for him, anyway – he was not missed. The mother and the father, he knew that he was nothing to them, anyway. They had not even given him a place of his own.

This is not a promising beginning to a story, I think.

They boy, there are things that might make some of his choices more understandable. He did not have real parents, not the way people think of them. His biological mother and father died when he was very young, two years, maybe? And so he was given to a couple, distant relatives of his mother’s. But they died, also. There was no one left to take him and, by this time, he was not the sort of boy that gentle souls would have wished to take into their homes.

He was young, yes, but he was cold. Distant.

People, they want the smiling, happy children. This boy, he was none of those things. He acted out. He learned that he was nothing more than an easy way to get monthly checks from the government. One of his many mothers told him this.

These are the things that made the boy hate the world. This sounds very dramatic, does it not? But in truth, it was a quiet thing, his hatred, for he was a quiet boy. It was more likely that he would break all of the eggs in the refrigerator and pour out all of the milk very late at night than that he would scream at one of his foster parents. He did not draw the happy pictures at school. He did not speak often or well.

And so, when he ran away, no one was very sad to see that he did not return.