Here's the next section of the story I am working on. It'll probably still make sense if you don't read the other sections. I'm not really one of those people who uses plot.

Here are links to sections one, two, and three.

 “I tried to kill myself when I was sixteen.”

            We are in the alley behind the bar. The ground is littered with cigarettes. We add to the pile, making statues out of ash.

            “I told myself if I didn’t have a girlfriend by my sixteenth birthday, I would do it.”

            Paul in the basement. Paul with a razorblade in hand, a belt, a gun. Maybe a pile of pills with the indicative empty orange bottle lying open on the floor.

            “My parents came home. I had the belt in my hand and I was putting the chair into position and my fucking parents came home. I couldn’t stand the thought of them finding me. That’s why I didn’t do it.” He pauses, smokes his cigarette. I’ve already finished two. My pack is almost empty. I take out another one. My stomach will hurt later. I will wake up smelling like cigarettes and want to vomit.

            “Adam noticed your wrists first,” he says.

            I smile. “That’s just how my arms look,” I say. I used to not inhale when I smoked, but I like the dizzy feeling it gives me.

            Paul climbing off his chair. Paul curling up in his bed in what he imagines to be a melancholic position, but actually looks pathetic, the fat of his stomach drooping onto his bed. Some people have a penchant for devotion. Paul is one of them. He likes to pledge to things, his parents, god, his fraternity, beer. He gets tattoos without wondering if he will regret them. He has already devoted himself to the ink.

            He confides in me because he thinks I understand the deep and heavy depression that he felt that day in his room and maybe still feels twinges of on bad days. The undying need of the depressed person to try to explain, make even just one other human being understand the unimaginable depth of what they felt. He’s not depressed now though, even if I sort of want him to be. His chatter is reminiscent and solemn. The way people who were formerly poor talk about starving as if it were beautiful.

 “I got a girlfriend a few months later,” he says. “I loved her and it was stupid. She broke up with me sophomore year. I guess I knew it was coming. We were going to get married. I proposed to her in the back of a car.”

The only time I’ve had sex in a car, it was a two door. We had to climb into the backseat. It was purposeful. Everyone knew what we were going back there for.

“I was with someone for a long time,” I tell him. “I didn’t break up with him because I didn’t love him. I broke up with him because I needed to be by myself. I can’t even remember who I was when we were together. I feel like I am a totally different person now, though I am probably exactly the same.”

He is not listening. He is thinking about his girlfriend. When we get into bed later that night he tells me, “I don’t want to hear about your ex-boyfriends.”

In drawing class we work on drawing spheres. We pin giant pieces of paper to the wall and draw long ovals.

“No footballs,” the teacher says as she walks around the room.

I am fairly certain I have drawn a stack of footballs. I want to go back to naked bodies. The teacher walks by my charcoal covered paper and tells me I am drawing footballs. We had a homework assignment to do reproduction of a Matisse self-portrait. I spent hours in the drawing studio drawing to reproduce his face with the same smudges. When she hands the drawing back to me, it has good job written in pencil in the corner. I am better at this, reproductions. As a child when hand a sheet of paper and a pencil I would always draw tornados. Giants tornados so full of swirling wind there was no room left for houses. I liked to draw tornados because  I felt my drawings were an accurate representation of reality. I liked doing this; reproducing reality as if simply having reality were not enough and I needed to create it again and again.

The professor says coming to the Midwest did something different to her art. She did not know something could be so flat and continue for seemingly forever until she moved here. She tried to depict this in watercolors. I think her paintings are boring. There is something reminiscent of elementary school gym class in these footballs stacked upon one another.