By Vanderbilt student Christian Crawford.
His interview can be found at https://anchor.fm/johannah-chanteria/episodes/Passion-Tea-Christian-Crawford-ea8fek/a-a1arf13, and the transcript at
It was a bitter cold. A cold that came from a breeze that felt almost familiar as it slid through the streets of the world. It gently stung the bare skin of those still wearing summer clothes, it pulled hairs to attention on goosebumped skin, and it made injuries sustained from the many fights in those streets burn. The naysayers claimed mere cold front, but as it swelled across the globe in a billowing wall of frigid wind, laities grew, groceries stores emptied, and the news stations continued to lie, and lie, and lie.
The cold wind had come far too sudden to send birds on vacation. It didn’t prepare a feast for bears or tell frogs to bury themselves under the mud. It came like an insult, cruel and jarring. It ripped apart journalists' hasty explanations for the explanation-less. It short-circuited radars, blew up barometers, and made thermometers into beacons of misery. Fighting was how people decided to cope.
There were premonitions. Videos surfaced of rodents throwing themselves off buildings, slamming into trees, and finding that small piece of metal on the base of a mouse trap irresistible. Chadbright Periwinkle from Late Night News on Channel 9 said it was the moon cycle’s doing and ‘after all, who is going to even miss the rats?’ A week later, mosquitoes started flying up towards the sky in globules of speckled darkness. Genivieve Stanton from Channel 6 at Six said it was due to climate change, yet left unexplained why they never fell to the ground. Some news stations warned of a looming economic crisis, some told tales of an imminent military coup, but none of them said anything about a wind that would evict the peak warmth of summer. They all marinated in anticipation of a crisis, there had been weeks of quiet, yet a quiet before a storm they could not possibly explain, so they didn’t, opting instead to lie. Emergency supplies had long run out because of these days drenched in misinformation, but outside, the fighting continued as if there was still something worth fighting for.
A muddied orange three story townhouse towered over the fighting, watching through barred windows for eyes, mocking even, as the frenzied crowds on the street spilled through alleys, into and out of doors, and around cars that rolled over unlucky ones. The small urban neighborhood, caught in the midst of a gentrifying scheme that deemed even the cracked sidewalks too unappealing for the shifting community, of course, had found fault in the gaudiness of this house. They hated the lime green accents on the façade and the bent white ash tree in the front yard. They were mere months away from forcing the owner to change its looks, but since one could barely hear their own thoughts over the clamor of fighting and flighting, in the midst of the cold no one even noticed it’s vibrant hues.
It was cold inside the house too. Boopy closed all of the windows that had let the summer air into his house because the breeze had turned too bitter. Nonetheless, the cold air seeped through the walls, under his front door, and into his bedroom. Some even came bubbling up through the bottom of his toilet, turning the water to slush. As a result, Boopy felt colder than his high school days spent tucked into an oversized T-Pain shirt he rarely took off underneath that far-too-thin fleece jacket he found in the lost and found. In fact, it even felt colder than the cold hands of his returned prodigal father when he said “I’m back, I know it’s just me and you now that your mothers gone, so I got you this painting so you know I’ll never leave again.” It was so cold inside that even Boopy’s dog, Lorkey, barked, and barked, at that same landscape painting on the wall doing all he could to ask for warmth.
Yet without so much as even glancing his barred windows, Boopy grabbed some blankets, curled up on the couch, and started crying. Fairly certain that it was finally the end like they’d been talking about on the news, he cried specifically because no one would ever love him. He cried a cry that made Lorkey bark a bark of woe, and in a perverted moment of beauty, their sounds intermingled with one another, reverberated up out the chimney to the right of his TV, and faded away into the cold outside air where people were still too busy beating each other to notice.
Boopy changed from the news to Netflix, and after some more convulsions of ugly sobbing, he paused to type in the word ‘romance’ one letter at a time with his remote. He curled up a little tighter, and then, after choosing the prettiest person from the selection of movie thumbnails, he cried a little harder.
Back before the cold, when a much younger, much more confused Boopy would stand behind a light blue counter in Vacci’s Vitamins for $3.35 an hour, he felt even more alone. Like the underfed lion and the sick peacock housed in the recently opened Metro Richmond Zoo, too often Boopy could feel the customers eyeing him out of pity and disgust. He felt at times like the universal, yet disappointing grandchild of the old health enthusiasts that bought calcium pills to dodge the wheelchair—but none of them gave him money for his birthday.
So on the rare occasion that a customer under the age of 30 walked through the thick grey doors of Vacci’s Vitamins, Boopy would turn on his own judgmental eyes. Noting the slight crookedness of a college woman’s nose, or the egregious underbite that a 15-year-old boy totally didn’t deserve, sometimes Boopy would begin to feel pretty. Relatively, his exaggerated facial features, covered by a roof of unibrow, and framed in an unevenly round face with pronounced dimples that looked out of place, weren’t as bad as some of the genetic tragedies he witnessed. But on the even rarer occasion that said young health enthusiast was attractive, Boopy would turn his judgmental eyes on himself. Turn them right onto that ugly unlovable loathsome self.
Stricken with a vitamin D deficiency since he was nine, he started to associate ugliness with vitamins. The doctor said Black boys almost always got it, his mother said it wasn’t anything unusual, but he, without the words to place the feeling, deeply felt that deficiency. In his mind deficient felt like defective, and defective felt like inadequacy, and inadequacy felt like isolation, and isolation felt like he was the only one taking the damn pills, so taking the damn pills felt like ugliness. But he didn’t have the words for all that yet, even though he knew good and well what ugly meant, he seldom understood all the feelings associated with it. Regardless, he heard the word every so often at school, saw it every so often on TV, and felt it regularly whether he put a name to it or not.
He’d pop an ugly vitamin at breakfast, try and get some sun throughout the day, argue with his mother, and then right after whatever carryout food she brought home was finished—with the used container in the sink—he’d pop another ugly pill. So he was really surprised when one of the prettiest people he’d ever seen came to buy the same vitamins.
Boopy didn’t know his name. He was dark-skinned with a face that looked like it could warm even the coldest rooms. He was dressed in a color-blocked hoodie, some black jeans cuffed at the bottom, a pair of socks with depictions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s head in various colors, and white Air Force 1’s. Boopy thought the outfit looked dumb, but a girl in aisle 4—with what Boopy considered was enough forehead for both her and her friend—got distracted from her conversation as the pretty boy with Ginsburg socks walked past. The boy looked down, holding a bottle of 5,000iu Vitamin D pills in his smooth dark hands, and passed right by fivehead girl on his way to register. He placed the pills on the counter, gracefully.
“Hello, I’m just getting this. I love that shirt by the way. I'm a big T-Pain fan.”
Upon hearing this, Boopy clenched his butt cheeks just a little, tapped into hidden wells of power—the same ones mothers tap into to lift cars off their children—and called for a little help from his fourth and sixth chakras as they opened wide, and so he managed, just barely, not to pass out. And with just slightly too much airiness in his voice, he responded, “Thanks. You too.”
There was a pause.
“Oh! Um, I like socks—I mean, I like your socks. Your total is $15.43.”
The movie ended. The blue eyed star football player got the blond haired girl to ask him out. She visited him at his picturesque house. The house with the hot tub, no parents. The same house Jane Doe and Dick Johnson might have lived in—they would have been happy in it too. It had a fancy AC system that probably never broke. A chimney that never let the cold air in. Maybe even a maid.
The football player was quirky. The girl liked comic books. Overall, Boopy gave the movie a solid 7.5/10. There were no romantic dating scenes carried by indie music that would blend the feelings emanating from colored carnival lights with notes on an acoustic guitar. There weren’t any people that looked like Boopy providing the comic relief. There weren’t any people that looked like Boopy at all. All the characters seemed to have a purpose: either boring the watcher or being in love. Nonetheless the movie made Boopy feel something, and that always garnered at least a 7/10. The football player was cute, that was the other .5. However as the credits rolled, the strange feelings didn’t glide away along with the names of 24 year old actors playing high school kids. No, the feelings stayed.
20 years of wear and tear on the T-Pain shirt he was wearing wasn’t enough to make any other shirt comparable to Boopy. You can’t buy beauty, but you can come close, and wearing this shirt was that closest Boopy had ever been to the boy with the Ginsburg socks. Wearing this shirt felt the same as it did before, the same as it always felt: familiar. The fibers compressed and the seams weakened, yet it still felt familiar. T-Pain’s face had faded and dimmed, but he looked familiar. Yet the ways he felt whenever he pushed his arms through the sleeves was never the same, like a shifting kaleidoscope of pain and love and pain and longing and nostalgia, there were days where he couldn’t even decipher what he felt, but even still, it felt like it would never leave. Until he kept the shirt on for more than 5 minutes and it became familiar again.
Boopy always assumed that the strange feelings would never leave, but if he had known they would freeze over during the 20 years since highschool, he would have told them to bury themselves under some mud far away from him, maybe in a field where they can fertilize something beautiful. Adorning an apron, he would have prepared a single person feast for himself—a celebration of solitude—maybe even would have released those flies that showed up in his stomach whenever he talked to a pretty person. Those flies surely needed a vacation.
But instead Boopy had been sure they would never freeze. He had learned since his confused days to always look at the world ready to love it, ready to love the things in it, but he hadn’t learned how to cope with the fact that the world didn’t find him lovable. He could handle the worlds flaws: if a D.V.D. skipped he knew the movie was not at fault and he knew a fly could soar with bent wings, but the mirror only told tales of powerlessness—not redemption. So he didn’t notice at all when the feelings began to freeze. He didn’t notice as layer after layer of coldness tightened the muscles on his face. He didn’t notice when the painful twang of waking up froze over. He didn’t see his eyes for love freeze almost entirely shut. So when cooled by the outside air, yet warmed by the bundle of blankets, the blueness of the football players eyes, the silence that came with Lorkey sleeping, the blondness of the girls hair, the classical music in the background that was just mediocre, the threat of imminent death, and, of course, the moving power of romance, he could feel the wells of feeling growing again. And he could feel them growing deeper.
After jumping at the screeching sound from a notification on his phone, he read first the bolded text: URGENT: Evacuate or Find Safety in Love. Then he read the wall of text underneath it, reread it, read it again, and promptly decided to write a letter that started with ‘Dear Beautiful, you are loved’ to the boy whose name he didn’t know.
There had never been anything specifically interesting about the boy. Boopy couldn’t point out anything that he liked about him in particular, but when he found out a few days after meeting him in Vacci’s Vitamins that they went to the same highschool, he began to like him more. He vaguely noticed him in the haze that accompanied a teacher turning on the lights without warning, only barely making out that the boy sat almost perfectly across the room from him, perfectly far away. And as if Boopy’s body knew his feelings better than he did, all of a sudden, while still trapped under a pencil graffitied beige desk, drowned in air tainted by boredom, and enclosed by dull walls with brightly colored chemistry posters, he totally forgot how to breathe. He started with an entirely too short breath, noticed the flies trying to escape his stomach, another too short breath, the boy was wearing checkered socks, another short breath, the boy was walking away, in through his nose, out through his mouth, and then the classroom was empty.
The fractured images stayed in his mind. Boopy dreamt about him. Thought about him. Never talked to him.
Dear Beautiful,
You are loved. It is very important that you know this, even if you never find out.
In case you care, I used to wonder, more often than normal, what a landscape painting would look like if the artist forgot to paint leaves onto the trees, but looking out the window, it proves to be fairly ugly. I know that people are calling it the erasure of hate, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean, but I only just realized why it started with leaves. The leaves had already gotten used to being cast away by the trees. They learned to shrivel up and die without calling attention to themselves until they were shattering under someone’s feet. The leaves were never loved, but the leaves never complained. And somehow, as far as I understand, whatever tree holds up this world must’ve got overburdened with its weight, and now its winter. Now some of us are the leaves. I sometimes think that some of us have always been the leaves.
The vanishing came 3 hours after the cold, right around when people stopped fighting in the streets, and all the crickets began to sound louder. I listened through my window at each crick’s desperation, as if they were many little calls begging for a response that hadn’t come for a while, like each one was their last attempt at being heard. I got a notification about it all, and I read it, and just like I guessed: it's truly the end for me.
I mean I guess none of us really know anything anymore. Maybe the little buddies, cricked a song in the grass because we're all going to live for once. Maybe the trees are evolving into big tree people, shedding their leaves and limbs for extra efficiency or something. Maybe the cold is preparing us for a new season as bountiful and beautiful as fall and spring always dreamed to be. I don’t know.
What I do know is that things are getting erased. Or maybe vanished is a better word. They say it’s the things no one thinks about or loves that go first. They say it will stop soon. They say to hold on tight to your loved ones. They say to check in on your family. I figured you were the closest thing I got, so I just want to tell you that I love you before it happens to you. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to Ujh
Boopy bent his pinky a little weird while typing that last word. He yelped a little from the pain and woke Lorkey from a heavy sleep. Lorkey barked.
“Shit Goddammit, the damn keyboard got my pinky all fucked up and the—”
Lorkey barked.
“—keys have always been a little too close together. I knew some shit like—”
Lorkey barked.
“—this would happen I should have gotten the dell computer not this—”
Lorkey started running around like dogs always do when they get worked up and barked louder.
“—damn apple shit that don’t even work right half the damn time. What do you want? Huh?!”
The computer vanished. Lorkey barked. Boopy got the message this time.
“Alright come on boy, it might be time to go find some food. I was through with that letter anyways.”
Boopy put on a long sleeve shirt, another long sleeve shirt, a hoodie, a puffy vest, a jacket, another jacket, and a trenchcoat with a hole on the left sleeve. He wrapped Lorkey as best he could in a king sized light-blue blanket with an orangutan on it. He brushed the lint off his fingers and they walked out the door, together.
With Lorkey by his side, Boopy walked down the cement path in his front yard. The grass had disappeared, the bent white ash tree had no leaves, the dandelions hadn’t been totally erased, but the tiny white petals vanished and the stems were frozen. Boopy’s shoulders sank ever so slightly at the sight of this, and looking around he noticed that all of his neighbors’ houses looked similarly wrong. Some of the houses were missing their walls, Boopy was very glad to at least have shelter, and with a mixture of fear and sadness disguised as bewilderment, both Lorkey and Boopy continued down the sidewalk, together.
There were times where in the bliss of day dreams, as they drowned out school, Boopy could catch a glimpse of a glimmer of hope. Somewhere in the space between the world of his inner thoughts and the real world was another world. A world that caressed the minutiae of his daily life with a heavy, yet tender hand as it lied about the future. This world whispered about how all was possible if it could be worked towards. It spoke clearly and didactically about how love wasn’t anything in and of itself, yet even deeper into the recesses of his mind it didn’t even need to speak, because Boopy could already feel that in this world love was and always would be made, manufactured even, out of ideals that weren’t, and never would be his own.
The comments Boopy would overhear in the hallways only existed in the real world. An awkward conversation, perforated by arrhythmic staccatos of silence, could be music in his inner world. But between the two worlds, there was always more work: he could always be cooler, funnier, and prettier than he was. In this world hands were meant to rub chemicals through hair to make it lovable. In this world eyes were meant to read pages upon pages of beauty advice searching for love’s formula. Feet gravitated towards what was pretty and ran from what wasn’t, eyes found refuge in what the looker didn’t have, divorces put meals on lawyers’ tables, stomachs were always too big, penises were always too small, chins to double-ly, dimples too dimpled, foreheads like billboards, lips for sucking dick, skin that divided. In this world Boopy could love, could love real hard, even despite himself, yet only in spite of himself.
This world presented itself, glimmering in the boys eyes when he walked by. It pulsated because of the way the boy with the checkered socks bravely answered questions in class. Shimmered a little at the way he dressed in designer clothing. But, never, never ever, did this world survive through the cold.
Lorkey and Boopy continued down the sidewalk, together. To Boopy, the silence was more noticeable than the sounds. No birds chirped anymore, no punches were thrown anymore, no crickets cricked anymore, no people were around to converse, the only sounds were the occasional pant from Lorkey and the faint pops from gunshots. The air felt discombobulating, like the dehydrated hangover from a rainy day. They sky was grey with few clouds as all the shapeless ones had vanished, only the occasional heart-like thing, bird-like thing, or person-like thing floated by. The leftover clouds were all white, not grey, no blemishes or holes, only neat white figures stared down at the disarray. Alto cumulus had vanished. Cirrus had faded into the grey sky. Cumulonimbus had been erased first.
Lorkey and Boopy continued down the sidewalk, together. Lorkey sniffed a collection of corpses still steaming on the ground. A group of people had sewn themselves together by their joints with thick lime green fishing line to save themselves from being erased. Splayed out like a surrealist sculpture, with one person, who must have been caught dead by the cold, dragging the rest by her shoulders, the bodies lay in various levels of disrepair. They were all still tied, joined by shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Some were even sewn by their head to the head of another, their blood crusting over like glue. An amputee was tied sidelong to a bodybuilder. A child was sewn to their mother. All their blood, caught mid drip in some cases, puddled out beneath them in others, spilling from their mouths and joints in some, all of it was frozen, together. The group decided they’d gamble with the erasure: either none of us are loved, or all of us will be saved. Since they had yet to vanish, clearly people loved them, loved each and every one of them, even loved them fully, but those lovers loved corpses now. The now corpses couldn’t handle the uncertainty of distant love. Didn’t know if an alcoholic relative or a baby father that rarely called was truly out there praying for them. But they had each other, and they would always have each other, forever.
Lorkey and Boopy continued down the sidewalk, together. They passed by corpse after corpse, many of the bodies missing most of their limbs and organs. The bodies lay in front yards of half vanished townhouses. In front of some of the half-erased buildings or along the freshly paved sidewalks were bodies with just faces, genitals, and hands left. Some were just brains. A few were just skin, hair, and butts. Boopy wondered what this could possibly mean.
Lorkey and Boopy continued down the sidewalk, together. They approached lovers that were laid out in the adjacent grass holding hands. A bullethole through their foreheads made them both ugly. A pistol in one of their hands was ugly too, a hunting rifle in the other’s hand was even uglier. Boopy would have been repulsed by the image if he could see it clearly. But through his tears, all he could see were the dates they must have went on, or the warmth from cuddling they enjoyed, or maybe even the arguments they managed to resolve. All he could feel through the burning heat of pain was the sensation of feet gliding along pavement, feet that loved too hard, feet that forgot, feet that didn’t see, feet that walked in the world only mirrors peered into. Lorkey barked for warmth, barked again for food, he barked again, barked again, barked for Boopy, barked for someone, barked into the abyss and the abyss didn’t bark back.
And deep in his heart, Boopy always felt that he was the abyss, and maybe in this moment Lorkey felt it too because, without wanting to waste more time, Lorkey continued down the sidewalk, alone.
There were many, many days where Boopy and the boy passed each other without acknowledgement. Boopy figured he wasn’t acknowledge-able.
There were many days where the boy and Boopy didn’t even see each other. Boopy pondered the possibility of the boy avoiding him.
There were days where Boopy didn’t want to be alive. However, he wouldn’t dare dash his chances with the boy.
But the days that matter most, were the days where Boopy forgot about the boy. Those were the really good days. Those days were filled with distractions, those days took a new color. It was the days where flowers radiated their hues like watercolors, diffusing beauty through the outlines of their frame, and trees gathered the sun in its leaves to redistribute in kaleidoscopes on the ground. In a quilt patched together by the blueness of the sky, on those days the clouds were in conversation, asking people what they saw in them, letting people know when the rain would come. Boopy always wondered if those days were truly rare, or if he just rarely noticed those days. He also wondered, if way up there, floating beyond the worlds problems, floating with no effort, floating no matter how big or small, if the clouds ever hated themselves.
I just needed something to work out you know?
Cradling his pen, Boopy drew the question mark pedantically, drawing and redrawing the curve until it looked perfect enough for his needs.
Did you ever think it would? Was there anything interesting about me?
Boopy was briefly distracted by the popping sound of his home’s outer orange walls vanishing along with the green trim.
I always figured I didn't fit into anything at all. It's like I'm a puzzle with all the pieces together, but they don’t converge into an image that looks right. Even if I rearrange the pieces I still look like there have to be missing pieces somewhere in me, sometimes I think I was never given the right pieces to be finished in the first place.
A pop. Another set of walls vanishing.
You never looked at me and saw something missing did you?
Another pop. The mirror vanished along with the white tiling on the bathroom floor and the slush filled toilet.
I dreamt about you. I thought you should know.
The bed popped out of existence.
In all of my dreams you would always love me from afar. If I ever came face to face with you, even in my dreams, even where I'm supposed to be safe, you'd slowly look me up and down, and before I could even see the distaste on your face, I could feel it.
The walls of the living room in Boopy’s town house vanished. Nothing else remained of the house other than the pillow he sat on, the page he wrote on, and the pencil he wrote with. Off in the distance a bark rang out, and had there been a person to talk over the barking sound, or a car to screech at an inopportune time, maybe Boopy wouldn’t have heard the bark. But he did, and it snapped him back into the real world. He looked around at the disarray surrounding him, and inhaling a deep breath of sweetening air, he wept. He cried a cry that blinded him to the horror of what he was, and in the midst of his anguish Lorkey barked a bark of love. And in an unexpected moment of beauty, the bark remedied his woes, reverberated into and off of the half erased houses sprawled out in what was formerly a neighborhood, and faded away into the quiet air. For the first time in a while, Boopy could feel a warm breeze brush against his face and flow through his curls.
Lorkey barked again, louder this time.