KEALEY, LIAM NOLAN
Mar 4, 2015 15:12:17 GMT -5
Post by LIAM NOLAN KEALEY on Mar 4, 2015 15:12:17 GMT -5
FOR YOUR INFORMATION I LOVE MY DEMONS BECAUSE THEY KEEP ME COMPANY
28 | HETEROSEXUAL | COMPLICATED | BOOKSTORE OWNER | LOCAL | RYAN GOSLING
Liam N. Kealey,
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wow, are you my ...i completely lost track of time! well please sit sit, let me just move this stuff out of the way. okay, let's get started. tell me a little bit about yourself. She’s late, and Liam is getting increasingly annoyed. His patience for this farce was already very low, but it’s dropping steadily for every second that she leaves him waiting. What exactly is the point of this interview? Some kind of town census thing? He doesn’t see why that has to be conducted in person, why he has to go through the torturous ordeal of interacting with another human being in a mandatory capacity. This is the worst. Restless, he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His eyes move without much curiosity over the titles on the half-empty bookshelf in the corner. The interviewer has unimpressive taste in books, and not much else in the room in the way of personal effects for him to form an opinion about her. He knows from the bookshelf alone that this is going to be awful. It's impossible to hold a decent conversation with someone who exclusively reads bargain bin paperback romances. He fidgets, more out of physical awkwardness than anything, shifting his weight once more and then folding his arms briefly before unfolding them again. She's very late. What the fuck is this? What kind of – ? Before he can begin mentally ticking off insults for the much belated interviewer, she makes an abrupt appearance, sweeping casually into the room and acting as though she’s surprised to see him. Biting his tongue to keep from commenting on this outrageously irritating behaviour, he takes her advice and takes the seat opposite her desk. Only then do her words actually penetrate through the barrier of his impatience and he registers that she asked him a question. Fuck. “Um, Liam. Kealey. 28, as of… I don’t know, last month.” February 3rd, actually. Almost exactly a month ago. “I run a secondhand bookstore in the city and…. uh, I can think a thousand places I’d rather be right now than here, so if we can make this quick, I’d be very appreciative.”that's a lot of information. so tell me, where are you from? He exhales a long sigh through his nose. He’s not used to actually having to tell people where he’s from. Most people don’t tend to ask and if anyone is even the least bit curious, he’d have thought the accent might make it obvious. There are few accents as distinctive and nasally obnoxious as the Boston one, even in New England. “I’m from Boston, but I’ve lived here… what, six years?” Why is he asking her? Why would she know that? Yes, he thinks it’s six, though. Or so close to six that it barely matters. ahh fascinating ! well i'm from here, born and raised, never left. so many people that i know and love here, just couldn't leave them ! what about you? anyone you care dearly for here? “Mhm.” He replies vaguely, clearly not paying the slightest bit of attention to whatever the fuck she’s rambling about. If he'd wanted to know where she came from or anything else about her, he’d ask. And considering how many fucks he currently gave about the woman opposite him, that was not a likely scenario. It was very unlike Liam to show interest in anything or anyone unless they really piqued his interest, and that was a fairly rare occurrence. Liam wasn’t interested in much of anything that didn’t have pages. There’s a brief lull in her talking and he glances up to see her looking at him expectantly. “What was the question?” She repeats it, and he shrugs in response. “Yeah, sure. There’s, uh… I have friends.” Hm. Kind of. He has a friend, for definite, but Dani is also much more than that and belongs to a few other murky categories that have recently got very complicated. Other than her, he pretty much has acquaintances. Colleagues. Old friends who aren’t really friends anymore. That kind of thing. He pauses for a moment, almost as if he’s surprised by the lack of people he ‘cares dearly’ for, but then he decides to shrug it off and make a flippantly sarcastic remark of it instead: “I’m a real people person.” quite a list. must mean you have a juicy past,let's hear a little bit about it. “Yeah, totally logical leap to make.” He remarks wryly. What exactly about his last answer would lead to any inferences about his ‘juicy past’ he wasn’t sure. But she was the kind of person who read shitty paperbacks, so this was the kind of plot twist she’d probably come to expect. “Not much to tell. Born and raised in Boston, like I said. Mom died when I was four. Dad was a raging asshole and an alcoholic. My kid sister needed someone to raise her, so I did it.” His tone is short, listing facts swiftly and dispassionately as though he had no personal stake in them. There was a time he would not even have said this much, would have classified it as nobody else’s business, would perhaps have not wanted to risk other people feeling sorry for him. He was, after all, the kind of person who could take pretty much any abuse anyone wanted to throw at him, but the second someone offered him kind words or a sympathetic touch, he unravelled. Couldn’t do it. It was for this reason that he tended to speed through the details of his tragically Dickensian early life, but talking about it at flippant speed was still better than nothing. “Family is a fucking blackhole.” He adds after a moment, as if to firmly close the door on that topic lest she try to ask him any other questions about it. He can mention the bare bones, but cannot hold up to any further interrogation. He does not want to talk about his dead mom, shot in a botched theft attempt when he was so young that all he can remember about her now is a vague warm feeling and the sight of her coffin being lowered into her grave. He does not want to talk about his asshole dad, who spent the former part of his childhood smacking the self-worth out of him and the latter half drilling it into his head that he was a worthless piece of shit who would never amount to anything. He especially does not want to talk about his little sister, his baby, who he loved more than life itself but who is… gone now. Unreachable. Long since swallowed up by Boston’s seedy underbelly. “I made some bad choices and things weren’t great for a while.” He says next, back to vagaries and half-truths. ‘Bad choices’ and ‘not great’ are sort of understatements, and don’t really do much justice to his whole ‘serious drug abuse and petty crime’ phase, but so be it. Talking about this stuff drains him, and he is suddenly too tired to go into great detail. “Eventually I got my act together, got out of Boston, came here.” He shrugs. “Went to college.” Some small, mediocre college in the city but still. Going to college and getting a degree at all is no small achievement for an opiate-addled disaster like him. His degree, of course, was in English Literature. Books have been the only things he’s ever cherished. They’re escapes, comforts, companions, outlets, art, everything that’s ever bought him any kind of pure or innocent joy. He is a writer of sorts too, but not a very successful one, and probably never will be. He lacks the conviction and motivation needed to tell a good story from start to finish and then force it out into the world. The words, the skill, the talent is there, but there’s no ambition. “I worked in a bookstore for the four years I was studying, but afterwards… just kind of stayed. Nowhere else was hiring, so…” Lie. Plenty of people were hiring. Newspapers and publishing houses and teaching jobs. Classmates were sending out resumes and getting job offers back by the dozen, but Liam was too apathetic. He had made a comfortable but dull little niche for himself, spending day after day in an untidy bookstore, stacking shelves, flicking through books, sitting around amidst clouds of dust and wondering if this was the pinnacle of being alive. It was not a bad lot. When his old boss retired last summer, Liam was the only one with enough experience and seniority to take over, so – very casually – he did so. It was a complete accident, this upward movement in the world from dead-end employee to small business owner, but he can’t complain. It suits him. He barely even has to work any harder. “Yeah, it’s mine now. And that’s about it, that’s the past. You got any more invasive questions?” you just get more and more interesting. is that a word that someone would describe you as? no? then what is something that people would say you are. Oh joy. She does have more invasive questions. “I don’t fucking know. I don’t care. If you wanna to know what people would say about me, go ask people.” He gives an exaggerated shrug – the closest he really gets to expressing any kind of physical agitation. He remembers his earlier impatience with this whole bullshit interview and multiplies it by the bitter taste left in his mouth after having to talk about his shit-show of a personal history and now he just wants to leave. To be honest, it would not even be that hard to answer this question. The thing about being kind of an asshole is that people tend not to be shy about telling you that you’re kind of an asshole. Liam has been described as rude, argumentative, stubborn, thoughtless, abrasive (that’s his favourite one – he takes a weird kind of satisfaction in the idea of being so unpleasant to deal with that he actually wears away at other people). Dani says he’s grumpy, and he sort of doesn’t mind that either. For the opposite reason. It sort of softens out the hard, blunt edge of his unpleasantness and turns it into something harmless. She makes it sound like his bad moods and difficult attitude are more of a personality quirk than a fatal flaw. She makes him sound redeemable. Of course there is more to him than a volatile temper and a tendency to coarseness… He’s smart, something he’s been told inconsistently since he was young by teachers, surprised guidance counsellors, professors, etc. He’s also been told he’s pretty dumb by most everyone else. He is one of those people with an exceptionally high academic intellect but very low common sense. Philosophical, analytical and all-round bright, he’s a very clever man… but has a tendency to make extremely stupid and ill-thought out decisions on the spur of the moment. He has no will power and thinks so much he confuses himself, so what else is he supposed to do? Stupidity is, unfortunately, a natural consequence of the convoluted way his brain seems to work. He’s also been accused at various points by many of the same people who applauded his intelligence as being literally the laziest person on the planet. Liam is the most unmotivated, apathetic, pointless waste of talent there ever was. If he had even a little bit of desire to succeed, the things he could achieve would be wonderful but he just… doesn’t give a fuck. He doesn’t want things, or at least is so scared of being a failure that he’s convinced himself not to try at all. Either way, nothing ever gets done when Liam’s involved. The one thing people don’t often say about Liam is that he’s actually a decent human being. This is probably due to the fact that very few people know that. Of all the secrets he keeps, you’d think ‘not being as shitty as you could have been’ wouldn’t be on high on the list, but it’s one of the things he guards most fiercely. Despite being an exceptionally loyal, protective, do you agree with what people say about you? She looks vaguely smug, as if he somehow told her everything without meaning to. Liam’s jaw twitches involuntarily – a direct consequence of irritated teeth grinding. “I literally couldn’t care less what people say about me.” He replies slowly, firmly. As if it is true. To an extent it is. Liam has never felt bad that other people perceive him negatively. But no one works as hard as he does to cultivate a specific persona if they genuinely don’t care. And there are certain things he can’t take being perceived as: weak, emotional, an easy target, an object of pity. “If you think you’re being clever, like this is some kind of psychoanalysis thing, you can knock that the fuck off. The fuck is this interview even for?” well i still think you have a certain something, not really sure what that is but i bet your boyfriend/girlfriend knows or are you still on the market? She doesn’t answer, but goes on a bemusing non-sequitur into his love life instead. Luckily, this is enough to disarm Liam before he can build himself up to full on irritation. “What?” He says, sounding almost as though he doesn’t even understand the question. He’s not usually so slow when it comes to romantic relationships, but he’s in something of a bind at the moment which has made him hesitant to even think about the subject too hard – let alone talk about it to annoying strangers. Liam’s romantic past is littered with one night stands, short flings, and the occasional toxic few-week-long affair that he tried to pass off as a relationship. He’s not good at that. It’s not as though he has trouble with women – he is self-aware enough to know he’s not unattractive, and especially in low lighting after a couple of drinks, he’s not a bad option. It has never been physical intimacy that has alarmed him. Emotional intimacy is a different ballgame, and being open and loving with another person is some terrifying feat he has never wanted to achieve. Well, until Dani. He refuses to linger in thinking how long he pined over her, in love but stuck with that persistent moniker of ‘best friend’. He also refuses to think of what her fuck of a boyfriend did to her. All he wants to think about is the precarious situation they’re in now – unstable, dangerous, probably even vaguely cruel to all the participants involved – but still. Secret relationship or not, ‘the other man’ or not, Liam’s currently with the only woman he’s ever felt even capable of potentially loving, and that is a good thing. Of course, it’s also not the kind of news you can share. “No, there’s no one. Having kind of a dry spell, thanks for asking.” shit, time flies. my next appointment will be here in a few minutes. it was a pleasure to meet you! Liam’s probably never stood up with such speed and enthusiasm before, but he’s out of his chair almost before she’s even finished speaking and heading towards the door. Freedom from messy personal questions and awkward conversation is so close he can almost taste it. “Yeah, thanks. Better luck with the next one.” He throws over his shoulder on the way out, so relieved to be on his way that he doesn’t even bother to curse at her one last time for good measure. |
PUN | GMT | 22 | NAH BRO
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