#(he'd be a fragment of a memory and he'd be watching himself become a lonely outer god wandering for all of eternity never to find peace)

[blerghie]

the fact that 999 spent maybe less than a month with kdj before he was like “you know what? i now see why they’re so obsessed with him” and then turned against sp

[dvchvnde]

You let the thoughts pass by as you reach for his old bible amongst the stack of books he left for you. You pick it up gingerly, the cover tattered and worn. The spine is broken, snapped beyond repair. You're not much of a believer in pristine book collecting, but the state of it leaves you feeling an odd assortment of pity and intrigue. 

The scent of him is thicker on the cover. Robust. You hold it to your nose and inhale. It smells ashy, of old cigarettes and charcoal. Pine. It makes you feel a little dizzy. The potency of it is strong, gluing to the fibrils of your lungs where it soaks, stains them with the sticky tar of his masculine smell. 

The cover is made of old leather. You peel it back, and run your fingers along the inscription inside. To our boy, it reads, the scratch of ink pressing hard into the soft give of the hide. May he always find the answers he seeks. 

This seems to be a hope he'd taken to heart. Blue lines bleed through the thin pages. Underlines, highlights. Sections smeared with oil and ink, blurring the words together as he thumbed across them over and over again. The margins are filled with his own notes. Doodles. Insights. He fills space with ink. Musing over his own questions, and underlining the answer he finds.  

It almost feels intrusive. Voyeuristic. Had he not left it amongst the pile, you might have closed the book and put it away for the sake of his own privacy. But it draws you in. Ensnares you. His questions grow broader, the subject evolving. The answers he finds in the pages become less and less frequent. 

It feels—

Lonely. 

His despondency shows vividly when he covers the words in art. An entire page bears the face of a woman. The likeness is shaded around the eyes, in the arch of their nose. It must be his mother, perhaps. Maybe a sister. You turn the page, marveling at the artistry line in dark charcoal. A rifle. A bird. A skull. Cigars, scotch. Dog tags. A cross. Bible passages with toiling lines circled around them. Notes. Little insights stenciled into the margins. 

Another page speaks about head trauma. Brain injury. Bullet fragments. Low caliber. tbi is circled in blue with lines branching out from the side of the curve. impaired thinking. memory issues. personality changes, depression. 

remarkable the cognitive recovery is stenciled in between the passages over and over again, as if he was reinforcing this notion to himself. 

It's jarring. Uncomfortable. 

The next several pages are even moreso. It screams its loneliness into the thin paper and you read each divot until you can't anymore. Until the words run together, and stop making sense. It's all nonsensical. Scribbles, doodles, and numbers that mean nothing to you at all. Unnerved, you go to put it away—

Something catches your eye. 

It's a photograph. 

A younger version of Johnny, maybe. Shaded in black and white. He's barefaced, too. Beard shaved down to a thin dusting of stubble, an odd sight compared to the thick tangle of hair you're so used to seeing on him. His hair, too.

A mohawk. The shorn sides cropped as close to the skin as he could get. The top coiffed and styled for the photo. His asymmetrical hairstyle makes sense now. You trail your finger down the slope of his jaw.

You deep an indent underneath. Ink pressed tight to the thin page, bubbling up from below. You tuck the photo of him, all cocksure and rough around the edges, back into the seam before turning the page.

And it doesn't make sense. Not at first. A series of small sketches cover the page, littered across it like small pondstones leading to the bottom. Nahanni, you know. Recognise the magesty of this gorgeous park. You follow the trail, thinking distantly of your old art teacher in school and the magnetism of the gaze, and—

The bottom is a black circle. Needlepoints cutting through the curves. Sitting in the centre is woman. She sits in the valley watching a moose graze at the bottom of knoll, and in her hand sits an apple—

"What'd ye got there?"