Marco and Brianna

a character sketch

Marco likes his guitar. He likes it more than he likes people. It speaks to him, it calms him, and the curves of the rosined wood feel soft under his calloused palms, calloused fingertips, calloused heart, and he’s a bleeding poet when his fingers dance across the neck. Marco is very musical, in fact; he plays piano, and his favorite composer is Beethoven, though when he’s feeling sad, he’s always up for a little Debussy. He’s very good at piano. He never shows his tender side, though--he plays in a band, sings and plays guitar and drums in a band, the Spotless Minds, and he’s the rock star of the community! He likes to wear navy, his favorite color, but sometimes he wants coral, though he’d never admit it to anyone. He always wears dark colors and skinny pants because he thinks it makes him look intriguing, but unkempt black hair and puppy brown eyes give way to his kindness. Marco is attached to Juliet, his sketchbook, but no one knows about it, or rather, her. He likes to draw wrinkled faces, naked women, and dripping liquids. He never draws himself. He’s a bit too afraid of telling anyone about his hobby, for he feels it’s too feminine, too sensitive. He’s waiting for a nice girl he can draw naked, like that scene in Titanic. His favorite movie is Pulp Fiction, though American Beauty takes a close second. He’s very witty, very loud, and an expert procrastinator, but something about him is sad, something’s missing, as if he was born under the eye of a blue moon and is burdened with the secrets of the universe. He often feels restless in school, like he should be learning more, learning quicker, and because of this, he doesn’t do very well. He knows a lot about music, art, math, and anatomy, but he always feels stupid. He hates himself more than anyone else in the world. And that’s his folly.

Brianna may as well be his soulmate. She’s pretty and thin and blonde, with swampy green eyes like a forest and red lips like a crab. Her face is so feminine, so pretty, it gives a first impression of innocence and naivety, but those are the farthest from what she actually is. She uses her prettiness to her advantage. Not with men, though it comes in handy when she’s hungry or short of cash; she goes to class intentionally wide-eyed, and her teachers fall in love with her, the old men and the old women, for she’s fresh, dewy, quiet and solemn. And her neuroticism gets her straight A’s and organized white binders. But secretly, she hates school more than anything; it stifles her creativity, sucks the love and passion from her, and she wants to be like Thoreau and roam free in a forest and paint and write. She keeps her hair right below her shoulders, because any shorter would make her look like a lesbian, and any longer would make her look like a hippie. She showers twice a day with her medium-length hay strands. Brianna always looks feminine and sweet in dresses, but she only wears dresses because she’s lazy and they’re easy to put on. Her favorite band is The Decemberists. Brianna is a poet. She’s a writer. She guesses her soul mate to be James Joyce. Brianna loves reading more than anyone else in the world, more than her mom or her cat or her best friend Kelly. Books are always there. Books are an escape. She adores Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and feels women should be more present in literature. She’ll be a writer someday--she’s very talented. She appears introverted but is always thinking. Brianna as very, very smart. But despite her intelligence, despite her looks, despite her dreams and wishes, she can’t shake this feeling of sadness, of ashen melancholy on a disparaging humanity, of hatred for her frog-eyes and gangly limbs and waxen locks, of existential crises, of nihilistic tendencies, and she weeps every Sunday night in a fit of anxious rage and obsessive tendencies. She’s not right in the head, and she’s waiting for someone like Hamlet to break her tenacious walls.