#idk something something metaphor for his lack of faith / vacillation between taking too much responsibility & not enough

[talentforlying]

@normaltothemax: how about something angsty? something to do with failure or something idk

the ashen taste of failure. novelists love that shit. they'll sit in the dark of their rooms or the gaudy yellow lights of a coffee shop for hours trying to put it in their own words, rolling their tongues along the ridges of their teeth to stir up a taste more poetic than the acid of their own spit, to really feel what they say their protagonists do. prettying up misery to package and sell, because who the fuck would want to read it if they were to come right out and say "some seventy year old git who just boked in the station toilet has been riding a train with no destination for hours, and if you ask him, he's pretty sure he's been on that train his whole fucking life"?

( yeah. he wouldn't read it either. )

if there is someone writing his life, trying to feed 'failure' into the flavor grinder, they don't have to try hard to come up with the 'ashen' part. it clings to him like a lover, like a second skin, like film stretched over leftovers you've already forgotten about and won't find again until the stench of rot starts to leak out the gaps around the door of the fridge. ash on his fingers, on his tongue, on his coat. ash in his wake, a long, slithering trail — bridges and lives and bodies and rules. cigarette stubs in the windowsill. every car's a non-smoking car these days, but since when has that ever stopped a determined enough wheezing working man from lighting up? never stopped him. there's precious little that does.

and that's the fucking problem right there, isn't it? nothing stopping him. people too shit-scared to get in his way. plenty of high-and-mighty fuckers to tell him off after he's done, oh sure; parades of angry scoffs and disapproving looks, fingers stuck in his face and punches to be thrown. but not a single fucker to hold him back when the tide is rising and he's still charging down the beach to kick sand in someone else's face. no one who can change his mind once it's been made up. no one who wants to make the plan, break the rules, take the dive, push the big red button. to fail. fucking sycophants and cowards with 20/20 hindsight, dooming him to lose again and again and again.

( sure, make it about everyone else but you, constantine. make it anyone else's fault but yours.

pretend like the only reason you're still shoveling the shit is because the nasty mean world won't take the spade away from you, pretend like being the only one for the job isn't exactly what you fucking wanted all along.

congratulations, con job: you're special. now fucking live with it. )

the ashen taste of failure. does failure leave the taste behind, or does the ash come first? does fate rub his nose in it once they've learned he's shat the carpet, or does it sprinkle down across his shoulders like powdery snow as soon as he steps outside, marking him for an inevitable fuck-up?

would it be easier to know that there really is someone writing his life, and that every ounce of burning shame sent to sear the back of his throat with each new drag on that ashen taste serves a purpose, eventually? it's all in the plot, you didn't get another friend killed for nothing. just the plot, putting your family into early graves and sinking your mind like a stone down the throat of your own titanic ego, until it chokes on unreality and the new god penance ascends the throne. a mechanism to get you from point A to B with narrative swiftness so the audience won't get fucking bored, so you'll find that next convenient little nugget of resolve and grow up a bit just as you were meant to, just in time to pull yourself together for the next big event.

except, he doesn't know what point B looks like. skipped the briefing, missed the stop. left all the resolve behind. someone else can go pan for it, find him a reason to change, hoard it or sell it or turn it into something worth keeping, something that might change the text on his tombstone from THAT BASTARD CONSTANTINE into SOMEONE WHO HAD SOMETHING TO GIVE, but for now, there's nowhere to go: there's only the act of going. only him and this train, and the fact that inevitably, eventually, it will stop. it has to, right? he can't continue like this forever. like chewing gum, he can't maintain the taste.

( why not? nothing stopping him. )

pull the e-brake. let him off here. something's burning, and he's pretty sure it's his life: going up in smoke, like every good thing he's ever touched. like bridges, and bodies, and rules.

hey, writer up there. do you taste that, when you roll your tongue around, stinging where you cracked open that split lip? tastes like seventy years of salt, doesn't it? when you press your hands to your eyes, can you feel ridges and scars doing the same, squeezing vitreous fluid up against your optic nerve? when you breathe, does your heart beat so fucking fast, so fucking hungry for that stolen air, that it feels like dying? does it feel like you've been losing for decades, yourself and other people, hopes and compassion and desperate fucking dreams clawing up out of your lungs in bits and pieces, and you can never spare the time to pick any of them up because the next one's already on its way?

failure doesn't taste like ash. novelists love that shit because it's easy, pre-packaged. failure tastes like this: salt his pride won't name as tears, and acid spit, and the last gasp of a low-tar cigarette on a train to nowhere, in a life maintained on the knowledge that as sad and sorry as he feels for himself now, he is probably yet to do his worst.

. . . yeah. you're right. he doesn't fucking like that ending either.

( nothing stopping him from changing it. )