AT THE STOA

  Unlike Max, she quit working out, and unlike Max yet again (who consistently does this,) she can write a rare inspired piece. The only reason for this gaping difference between them is because, as she explained to Max when they had moved to a different messenger in what seemed like ages ago, “Boredom is at the once the greatest invention of the human mind and the most painful insult of humanity to the majestic fuckery of the universe. So no, I may not get bored. I may write, yes, but I respect what things are. Unlike you, I have to draw the line of my ego somewhere. Even if it takes me a thousand-mile radius to do it. You are at the limit of that thousand miles. I can, however, draw that line . I am afraid you can’t; you do not know – and, as a writer, should not know - when you as a writer stops. I, on the other hand, have to stop somewhere: otherwise I would write you a love sonnet every day and not even like you. It goes against what poverty-stricken moral compass I have.” I...

  During the fifth day of training, Max, wearing a balaclava and no shirt, was lifting two logs off of a pile, one on each hand, having carefully chosen in terms of their weight and heft. This workout will be hell on his lats and deltoids, he knew. It was worth it, though. Every good punishment to the body is worth it. During the fifth day of training, Max, wearing a balaclava and no shirt, was lifting two logs off of a pile, one on each hand, having carefully chosen in terms of their weight and heft. This workout will be hell on his lats and deltoids, he knew. It was worth it, though. Every good punishment to the body is worth it. Nietzsche would disagree, he thought, but the man had purported syphilis, not to mention one bitch of a sister. He would rather go the way of Giles Deleuze: having steak for all meals of the day, drowning it with rum. And then boom, glorious, glorious defenestration! If Max were truly honest with himself, though (for in the most important moments of h...

  So wild,  This thing. So brazen and untamed,  My breath hitched,  And went away altogether.  Replacing all insecurity with Stones the shape of your hands. So wild, this thing. So solid and sure, Chinks in my armor are kintsugi'd by gold.  Tracing every scar, every battle, Revelling in the dance victory cannot even compare to.  So wild, this thing.  So much like a storm the size of its own eye, Gazing at me from the universe of your words, And whispering, "No. You may not go." And went away altogether. R may not go."

  She understood, also, that she was an attractive woman, and hence, according to the few solid principles that she had, refused to use that fact. She found women and men that just knew that they were attractive ugly. Logic demands, therefore, she being attractive, that she take up Muay Thai with Honey Lou and Janice, if only for the exercise. After all, she was done with karate when she was in high school. (It lasted for all of six months, this second training, and then COVID hit.)  All three of them, when not in the gym, led rather sedate lives of editing audio transcripts. They did almost everything identically and together, except when Chris, then hit with an existential desire she had felt for as long as she can remember, invited them to build houses for the Philippine indigent. (She always wanted to be in humanitarian aid, deciding on and then subsequently being turned off by the Red Cross.) Both had refused, citing time. They then spent their remaining time before COV...

  “Hurry up and wait,” cousin of the more formally named Parkinson’s Law, was the slogan of the Armed Forces, especially its Air Force. It turns out his Captain wanted nothing from Max apart from cloves for his teeth. He sent Chris two pictures just then, of himself and of his squad in various poses of boredom. It relieved her: she thought they would go full radio silence for two weeks. It would have been alright had that been the case, though, having learned the hard way with all her fifteen exes, and the spaces in between, of the virtue of patience. Or indifference. Sometimes she couldn’t quite tell the difference between the two. Yep, hurry up and wait does not pose problems to her: she could wait, because she didn’t try . He, however, had the temperament of a bull sometimes, and she remarked upon it. “Is this worth your anger, baby?” “Silly, isn’t it?”, he would say. But then , he thought, if you can’t treat your lovers as your friends, then what was the fucking point? He added...

  Having found that she referenced Sir Terry Pratchett so many times in her blog, for all that he had read of it (she wasn’t sure), and in all their conversations, (all of which he paid attention to) he commented to her one morning, “You really love Pratchett, don’t you?”, adding that he didn’t – or couldn’t – read Discword, and preferred Neil Gaiman’s American Gods instead. “I have two things to say to that. One, I find that one outgrows Gaiman around the time of Trigger Warning . He is good only insofar as you are in your 20s. Second, I have read all of Sir Pratchett’s corpus, save one: his last book. I don’t want to say goodbye to him again. Not yet.  My favorite book of his is Thief of Time , although it did not contain characters that I loved: Sir Samuel Vimes, Esme Weatherwax, Patrician Havelock Vetinari."  She had planned to call her firstborn Havelock; he, Vlad. That ought to tell anybody all that they need to know about why they were dating. "However," she con...

  Going full Foucault is like going full Björk Guðmundsdóttir, only in the opposite direction. Chris has always viewed the infamous singer warily, not asking but knowing full well that Björk might as well be one of Max's exes, although with one exception: he might actually love her. She wasn’t jealous: the past had nothing to do with her, and she can do nothing about it. Indeed, her equanimity with the past drove Kadafi, her seventh friend-turned-boyfriend of hers, to request, “Can we fight, please, Chris? You never seem to get jealous; I feel undervalued.” Anyway, Björk. With lyrics like these, almost pretentious for their straightforwardness, she indeed was wary: I'm a fountain of blood In the shape of a girl You're the bird on the brim Hypnotised by the whirl Drink me, make me feel real Wet your beak in the stream Game we're playing is life Love's a two-way dream Leave me now, return tonight Tide will show you the way If you forget my name You will go astray Like...

  She remembered when her mother had died, and the resultant buffoonery his father made of his eulogy, ultimately making it about himself and his obviously megalomaniac desires, rendering everything flat and beheading everyone. Her sister, on the other hand, cried throughout her prepared eulogy, in the same way that she cried when she found their mother's corpse in the morning, in the same way that she demanded of Chris, when she then joined her: “Cry. Goddamnit, you cry. ” After four years, she has yet to grieve. She remembered her own eulogy for losing the stoic and cold mother that she had had: in it she told the story of her favorite time with her, when she was about seven years old. Proving that her writing is indeed fast becoming full of white blood cells, she published part of the eulogy in her blog: As a child, the fondest memory I have of my mother was when I was about eight or nine years old. She took me to her workplace one day, and we passed by a tree that was overg...

  Before sleeping, however, his sleepy mind took on a final memory (that was always the anteroom to dreams); this time of what he said to Chris one hour before leaving for the barracks: “Take a little break from your writing, baby. Your prose is becoming full of white blood cells.” A pause, as always. Then, what the fuck is that?, she thought, with both endearment and alarm. Did he mean what she thought he meant, or that her prose was her way of slowly being vulnerable, attacking her own immune system, laying herself bare for the entire world to see? Chris, not knowing how exactly to respond, chose to side with scientific facts (which she knew he hated, but proceeded to give him anyway, characteristically unsure of herself). “I actually was given a CBC by this physician, and he said that my white blood cell count is off the charts. I was on the threshold for leukemia, not like my mother.” (Her mother had died of metastatic breast cancer four years before – finally leaving her an or...

  Max laid in the bunker for a long time, knowing that he will be a zombie for the training that awaited tomorrow. His thoughts turned to his exes, after being called his last name by Chris and him calling her her last name in turn. She was the only one to do so for a long time; and he didn't want to delve too deeply about what this means, if anything, to him. One particular ex stood in mind: Teresa who took an interest in him only after seeing him lift a boiler by himself as aid to his best friend moving houses. Her eyes grew wide at his impressive physique, and the way he shouted a release of effort, much like the kia! in karate after a final punch, or kick.  Teresa ultimately reminded her of another ex, Patty, who was pretty much the same, the only difference being sleeve tattoos, one self-published book, and pink hair styled the way a bird, or a chicken, might look.  What is this eternal return of the same?, he pondered, knowing Chris had ruined such women for him. T...

  “Wow,” said Janice, Chris’ best friend, “he actually apologized?”, knowing full well and being audience to Chris’ trauma dump every time she either got ghosted, left behind, or hurt, one after another, by her now-fifteen always unapologetic exes. Chris knew this, and knew this well: even her nephew, Tres, always reminds her of how she had a very poor track record when it came to men. She married the last one, Tim, after all, and he went back to the States after proving once and for all that he cannot quit his alcoholism. After suffering the hell of six years, she quit him, instead, she, of the eternal indifference of most existentialists, had had enough compassion fatigue. Janice was a strange one: an introvert to her very timid core, she was only mindful of duty, and hence kind of neurotic because of it. She was Chris’ voice of reason, one among a handful of people that can call her an idiot and shut her up. She knew it; Chris knew it. They both know that the other knew it....