everything quiet on the long trail outside

at 9:30 he decided to stop. he couldn't remember the last time he put this amount of effort into a singular project without blaring distractions about other things pecking away at him. Some jazz quietly waffled across the breeze running through the house. His hands were stained with marker streaks, a bi-product of the drawings he unleashed on the poster boards in front of him. He wasn't an artist, never had any real propensity to draw, or create, but he found the package of poster boards, someone must have left them in the house, and he had the magic markers, and he couldn't think of a whole lot else to do with his time.

The girl would have been proud of him but she was gone now and probably not coming back. Something felt funny about having her around constantly so he started an argument. At first she thought he was kidding when he complained that she must have eaten all the Kosher Dill pickles he enjoyed on his sandwiches. He griped about this for several minutes before he began violently pulling items from the refrigerator and throwing them to the floor in between shouts of calling her "selfish" and a "liar". It didn't take long for the girl to leave, promising to return when he wanted to "call to say he was sorry". As of now he hadn't called and had no intention of doing so. He liked the girl but it seemed like he got more done without her there.

Now that the squeaks of the markers had ceased the silence in the house was in stereo. He peered his eyes back and forth as if to make sure he had been alone the whole time. He looked down at his new works spread out across floor amidst full ashtrays, plates of dried up food and dirty laundry. He was working with three colors, green, black and red. When he'd first started making these lines across the white paper he wasn't sure what he was trying to get, and now that he was done, now that he realized he put such effort, such focus, into it he felt that there must be something to it. He studied the wild lines, the shapes, the circles, the boxes he filled in with vicious streaks. He even looked at the quiet spots on the paper, where nothing was filled in. Maybe all this summed him up in some surreal, abstract way, maybe he was just a bundle of noise trapped inside a box, shooting around trying to get into the quiet. Of course it was equally just as possible that he just needed to get outside for a little while.