The Cut Monologue

“Ugh.” I muttered, staring at the ceiling of our little cave. There were cars crossing every second, ready to fall through and smoosh us like the penny on the train track, and I traced their imaginary path across the metal and cement with my eyes. “I know I said it first, but I don’t want to talk about the next generation. Our generation is still the next generation, and I really don’t want that to change. I want us to always be the next generation.” I bit my lip and watched the shadow of Carter walking off to piss into the stream. My voice dropped until I was whispering, hiding my words from the echoes of The Cut. "I wish, when somebody wrote the story of my life, it actually had a plot. You know? With an enemy and a beginning, and an end. You know... interesting. But it's just us,

sitting here, doing jack shit. How does that even happen? When all those celebrities sit up with their plaster-hard faces and talk about getting bullied and overcoming their fears to fucking be something, and leave their mark on the world, and my life's plot is just sitting here, drinking overly sugared ice tea out of a jar and recording when the grafitti changes on the piers holding up this bridge. And God, if the cement crumbled and the bridge dropped, it would erase basically our entire life because there is no epic romance or battle or massive struggle. Just sitting here and ranking the fucking graffiti out of ten."

Alys frowned.

“If I’m not going to his party now, I certainly won’t next summer. When everybody gets back together and tries to pretend that they aren’t failing Intro to Econ, and brags about their fancy new internship where all they do is pick up coffee and hand out cheaply made business cards. Or worse, the guy who doesn’t end up going who spends the entire party trying to pass of his year spent working in a car wash as a cultural gap year before he really starts life. As if everybody doesn’t know that he will be scrubbing some six-year-old’s puke off of cracking leather for the rest of his life, his fingers turning into leather from the soap until fingering his girlfriend makes her feel like she’s being prodded by a fence pole wrapped in sandpaper and eventually he just stopped trying to be sexy and fucks her to ignore that he hasn’t been anybody since high school. And every year Alex’s parties will have more of those people with bigger beer bellies and angrier eyes until the parties stop happening because the few who succeeded ran away and those who are left are to busy getting wasted on old person alcohol to try and pretend they’re interested in

socializing.”
“We won’t be like that.” I said, reaching out to grab her fingers. Not that I entirely believe that, trying to blink the image out of my eyes like excess contact solution. It doesn’t entirely work, the brown and green of Alex’s basement swirling like when Claire tries to play bartender and mixes with a tin spoon. “I won’t let us be like that.”