i just let the silence swallow me up // { lex }

i know you're sleeping by now
but i'm still up walking around
the walls of my skull bend backwards
and in like a labyrinth

It should be harder, she thinks. Getting back into the routine of her life. ("Old life," she'd once named it, but the syllables dried out her tongue. Maybe she should make some distinction between the Lex that had both killed and been killed, and the Lex that had not. It feels disingenuous to do it. The Lex that hadn't yet been reaped was always capable of calculated killings, of enduring the fucked up shit she was put through. Maybe she's changed, but she isn't different. Lex is Lex is Lex. Right?)

Arthur has been every bit as eager to leave the whole thing in the past. Mourning a child is far too close to feelings territory, and if ever there was something the master-of-all-trades could never quite figure out, it was that. Both Lionels are content to accept their luck — good and bad — and move forward with their lives without dwelling too much on the unchangeable.

And so they set to finishing the purpleheart puzzle desk (fully assembled since Lex left it, but still in need of a few more coats of varnish) and moving onto new things. The big sale that Arthur made while Lex rode the train home financed the next project — wrapping their front porch around the side of the house. She takes the lead while Arthur works through the backlog of commissioned pieces, and when Lex's arms ache too much to heft a hammer, Burl curls up on her lap while she transforms the heap of scrapped black walnut into flocks of helpful horrorbirds, into whales, into lions, into skulls.

On the back corner of her workbench, the two empty covers of a disemboweled journal lay open. Errant bits of paper confetti decorate the tabletop, fidgeted fresh from the notebook's spiral since the last time Lex swept the shredded salutations and crumpled attempts at notes into the garbage.

It isn't that she has nothing to say — Ripred knows that's never stopped Lex Lionel before — it's just that it's impossible to get it right. How are you even supposed to address the people you only know from that week you spent murdering each other? They're friends, she thinks, or at least they felt like friends. Around that campfire, down in the Vault, on the train ride home — is camaraderie not the same thing as friendship? So it should be easier than this, right?

But it doesn't matter if she can only get as far as Hey Freckles, so that splinter under my thumbnail (the cherrywood one) grew out last week. — Lex doesn't have any way to send them out even if she could think of a better next line than Guess that means we're not allowed to be friends anymore, officially. It was a joke when she first thought of it, but it doesn't really feel that way the longer it sits on the tip of her pen.

Not when every conversation they've had in the months since the Games has taken place strictly in Lex's head. It's a lonelier style of one-sided than giving a beginning whittling tutorial or detailing her failed wolverine kit heist or describing the braised rabbit so tender she thought she'd died and ascended (she'd only done the former), while Denali was catatonic or asleep or unconscious. She's not sure how it became second nature over such a short span, but even so Lex can't kick the habit of narrating her thoughts like she's dictating them.

She rummages around in the bottom drawer of her workbench for a few minutes, then gives up and presses her pen to the inside cover of the notebook. "Hey Freckles." Speaking aloud to herself, to the card stock, Lex takes notes on her own ramble. "This is dumb. I miss you." Ink smears on her hand as she pushes the words across the semi-glossed cover. "Everything at home is normal." She can fix the smudges later. "We finished the puzzle desk. Arthur sold a fancy casket for a lot (even without gluing dried pasta to it) so I'm expanding the front porch with the extra money. Burl doesn't know it yet but she's excited that means more territory for hunting mice."

By the fourth line, she's picked up enough sawdust on the side of her hand to mitigate the smearing. The fine powder serves as an eraser, removing speckles of letters. "Five crows were making a huge racket perched on the gutter near the woodshop door the other day." They weren't delivering mail but she thought of Denali anyway. "It's quieter than I remember here otherwise. Everything's normal, only it doesn't quite feel normal anymore."

She reaches the bottom of the notebook cover and has to squeeze her signature into the bottom corner. It doesn't matter, she isn't sending it anyway. "Yours, Lex"

notes

title & lyrics — something : julien baker

timeline — ~6 weeks following the 80th games