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"What do you do for a living?" is not an appropriate question to ask.

His answer is and always will be "Nothing," because he doesn't live for anything and does nothing to live, and people always seem dissatisfied with his answer.

If they asked him "What do you do?" he'd say he does nothing, too, but if they asked him what he is he'd say "I'm a writer."

It's as simple as that.

--

(There's lies.)

He says that death doesn't matter, because he likes to (make himself) believe that things that don't last forever won't be lost when dead, but he sees tears and he sees pain and he's not so sure in his convictions anymore.

There's a period of time when he debates whether to end a sentence with and it's gone or and it's still there, but then he hears a song that says something about reality and he ends up writing and it's unknown.

(He doesn't truly believe, but deception is so pretty.)

--

"Who was your first love?" is not the correct question to ask him, either.

He won't answer with kindergarten crushes or high-school flings, and he'll just say "Nobody," every time they ask and the people that do the asking won't believe him when he says it, because surely everyone's been in love with someone at some point?"

If they asked him "Have you ever been in love?" he'd say yes, but if they followed it up with the question of "Who?" he'd have no name to answer with.

(They keep asking the wrong questions every time around.)

The correct question is "What?" and the answer is the world.

--

The truth is that nothing he knows is alive.

Is there shame? his bones whisper, and he feels the pressure of metaphorical tidal waves closing in and stealing away all that he's ever known in an ocean of reluctance, and he closes his eyes, closes them with false hope, and nothing is as dark as when he opens them.

We're alive, he thinks, and then wonders who we are.

--

He'd define love as unstable and fleeting - the romantic kind, anyway. He wouldn't toss away his love for brick walls streaked with graffiti that sends a message for the world, nor the love he holds for the girl in class who never speaks but murmurs the answers under her breath with a voice she won't let be heard - but that isn't the romantic kind, either, so he'll define that type of love as reliable.

The love he doesn't trust is the one that he's read about - not written about, because he writes of things he knows - but the love he reads about is fantastic and earth-shattering and painful.

He likes his world the way it is, and nothing that can shatter it can get in it.

(It does. But he doesn't notice.)

--

Pressure.

If he shuts out the noise he doesn't really hear, he can feel something heavy and supersonic pushing against him.

It hurts his eyes, not his ears, and the bleary light that creeps from under the floorboards is too intense and he lays back down, looking at the birds.

(Is he dreaming?

He doesn't want to know.)

--

He doesn't believe in people, has lost his faith in them long ago - but he writes them as more than they are simply because he can't stand to think of them all as cowards. His texts are bleak and descriptive, and he finally finds himself creating a character - one that is all his own.

The name he gives it is something unknown, and when he grasps at it through his endless maze of nimble fingers deft tones gray haze there's excitement and then there's Red- and he's cut off again.

(He thinks it might be Redemption, but the part of the paper where the name should be stays blank.)

--

Redd is tall and magnificent, and Redd smokes cigarettes because they hurt throats and clog up hearts and are a bad metaphor for love, but he can't stop writing about this half-finished androgynous Redd even when he hasn't slept for days.

Redd doesn't have slender, agile fingers like heroes do in the poems - Redd bites nails and has bleeding scabs around the fingers because lighters can be tricky to open, and Redd doesn't like to talk and has short hair and somehow manages to become more than words on paper for the first time in a young man's life, and he obsesses over making Redd real.

(Of course, when thinking about it, Redd is more real than his creator - Redd is the result of nothing in the place of love, and Redd speaks with words his writer hasn't chosen.

Redd is.)

--

He doesn't know when his creation began to take up every page in his book - can't pinpoint when it began to feel like Redd was part of ordinary life, and it almost feels like Redd is watching him from somewhere beyond, peering at him with eyes the writer has described as mossy.

Redd isn't much of a talker, but he knows he won't need to make Redd speak because in his story, Redd prefers action and the way he executes things rages from excellent to clumsy.

(Redd has become part of him, and he writes him as beautiful, the very next day.)

--

I'm going to leave, Redd says one day, and he twitches, pen stopping abruptly at the end of a sentence; he walked to the middle of the road, as if waiting for the rain, but it ends there for then and he frowns at the words on the paper.

"You're not going to leave," he says determinedly, and his pen comes to life and writes that the rain never comes but the sky stays just as gray, and Redd sounds sad the next time he listens.

I'm leaving, Redd says, and his writer sits, trembling, because his book has become far thicker and longer than he had anticipated, well over a thousand pages, and his pen finally clicks against the paper and the story flows onward-

-as if waiting for the rain, and in a state somewhere between lucidity and insanity, Redd sees the light approaching him - yellow globes shining through the dark, and it hits him hard.

His chin hits the ground first, and blood smears from his lips and he can't breathe normally with all the wreckage in his chest.

"I'm sorry," a trembling voice breathes, and Redd hears it from up above - above the sky that looks grainy and pale.

"I killed you," it continues and Redd shakes on the road, rain beginning to fall like blots of ink.

Redd dies.

(Redd taught someone how to love and let go, he thinks, and then there is nothing.)