The air reeks of alcohol and loneliness, the kind that sits heavily on your tongue and in your ears, whispering stories. Two boys sit loosely on the yellowing couch, their cheeks just recently touched with the fine stubble of adolescence and their voices just beginning to deepen. Their faces are the epitome of youth, and you think they are out of place in this place of intoxicating sadness.
And then you see their eyes.
Lifeless eyes.
Faded with stolen beer from their parents’ closets, watering with the lull of drunkenness, they are away. The boys are silent; the air is too thick to receive their meaningless syllables. These eyes are not those of children, but of old men hoping to forget. Forget what, you ask?
They do not know.
They lie limply, open as beautiful roses decaying from the inside, and drink. The bottles, soon empty, cry in their miserable places. Beer, rum, vodka, box wine, Manischewitz, anything. Anything and everything that dulls the ache with no root. Does it even ache?
With no more to drink and far-away eyes, the boys pick up the empty bottles and throw them blankly at the whitewashed wall. You flinch as the glass shrieks and shatters, falling to the floor in so many lonely pieces. The boys do not seem to hear it; they sit, staring into their laps that receive waterfalls of salty orbs.
Each alone, confined in their self-made prisons of broken glass and undue tears, the boys with old eyes remain silent. And you, burdened with the weight of the air and the silence and the tears and the loneliness and the hopelessness and the apathy
and their eyes
run.