It’s no surprise it steers this way – one comment driving headlong into another context entirely, pulling the teeth of what could have been simple birthday wishes into a deeply rooted guilt trip. They tug deeper than the roots even as the messages continue to chime through the relative silence of his Lowntown apartment, a long, slow pull at heartstrings that seem to cross the universe, faster than light, to keep planted in the well-worked ground back home.
It isn’t that he doesn’t love his family – that he doesn’t wish that his mother and father are doing well, that his brothers are taking it easy underneath the pounding rays of the sun, that his sisters are being treated well, treated right. It isn’t that he thinks life on a Mahoroban farm is all that bad or that he doesn’t feel like he could be happy with his boots on the ground, head in the clouds.
He just knows he won’t be happy if he doesn’t try.
And he has made it this far: Some hovel of a building in Lowtown, a room to his name where he can lay his head down at night, which might be far, far away from the bright lights of a higher calling, but everyone has got to start somewhere and forward isn’t always the way the path goes. The journey is never straightforward; it turns, it veers, it takes curves no one expects it to take sometimes and sometimes that means falling back a few steps, and sometimes it means enduring the late night weight of worries imposed on his shoulders from even light years away.
So, he listens. He might not act, but he listens.
It’s all he can do.
It becomes one of the better shows, this open mic in some no name place in the depths of Lowtown – so far in that Max isn’t sure how anyone found the venue in the first place. The audience listens even if it is just with an ear of tolerance while their attention remains more readily focused on the shuffle of cards on the tables in front of him or the upped antes by someone who might just very well be bluffing to with the pot. They don’t throw anything at him – not for a missed chord they don’t recognize even though he does or a song choice that doesn’t quite sit with the vibe of the room, and there even ends up being a few credits tossed his way extra, making up for the loss of a free staging.
Thankfully, there is no agent to pay, no swindler to run off with his well-earned credits – chump change, perhaps, but it is enough to buy himself a beer or two, maybe something to eat whenever he decided to hit still lively Lowtown streets to head home. He sidles up at the bar, narrowing into the smaller moments around – the open beer bottle in front of him, cool enough; the patrons leaning on the bar for their own drink; a passing smile or brush of a shoulder that becomes a little too close in some cases and warmly welcomed in others. A few whispered compliments garner a smile, some small talk breeds conversation, and there’s no expectation of much – just single serving, self-fulfilling moments wrapped up as soon as the door clicks closed again.
He looks over the latest addition to a temporary phone book, crumpled up on bar napkins and bleeding ink lines – old fashioned, but far easier to throw away in the waste bin when all is said and done.
It’s never quite like Old Hollywood – one far older than Terminus has even seen, that anyone on it has ever lived, picked up only in ancient holo-films, redone time and time again by the familiar faces that bring in the movie money, that make it worth their wiles; but there are moments where he recognizes it, such young romantics, in the more tender of times – laid back, fingers combing through tresses of hair, smoothing them out, cutting through any tangles that might lay, a slow and smooth massage at the scalp which would threaten to put anyone to sleep under most circumstances.
They make him think of something easier – those moments, those days, that weren’t so complicated as trying to find work this place and that just to scrape by enough by the end of the month to pay even an affordable rent for someone who had something steady.
Unfortunately, nothing had been so steady since he had set foot on Terminus, since he had ridden the wings of hope and a prayer and a shuttle paid for by the change in his own pocket and used by those who had no reason to go digging around such parts in the first place; and that had been foolish of him, maybe, and once in a while, especially those where even in current company he was lost in the smooth sway of slow thought, he thought “what if”.
Rhetorical – always – since there was no way he was going back any time soon; since the ship had sailed, the bad had already happened, and he’d just have to pull up his bootstraps and make it from where he landed, perhaps poor, but not dead and still ready to put on a good show when called upon.
There was only the future, forward facing, ready for someone to press the accelerator down and throttle ahead no matter what might have stood in his way or stood to made a complication – whether something so bombast as a business dealing gone wrong or as calming, soothing, as the trace of fingernails on his scalp as they combed through his hair.