In Our Blood (5)

 

 

-5-

In Our Blood

 

There are things you tend to say when you're alone.
There are tones you tend to take when you're at home.
Let me be that thorn, thistle, or key.
Let me prove you'll unlock just for me.
It's in your eyes we fail to even try.
It's in our blood to watch each day go by.
-Horse Feathers

 

                I wake up to a twine of light, to the smell of dried squid and kimchi, to the hammering of waves on the sleeved beach and the voices of hundreds of bodies rushing, dragging, crawling, and stalemating through life.  This is the world I was pitched into, it’s a canvas alive with dried-up artists caught in the paint of their own doing and undoing, a desperate struggle to be or not to be, the most fucked up novella ever penned or imagined, but still- and this is the miracle of its being- even with all the dredge and despair, it somehow remains unequivocally beautiful, like dusk over a battlefield.

                I lean against the window sill of my single hotel room, shaking ink onto the page and carving my thoughts into the bleach.  The curtains swallow the soft salt air and dance like brushstrokes.  I can see the island where our letters lie buried in the sand.  It rests ceremonious as a tombstone, draped against the horizon like a dying sun in emerald, the memory of it like a certain secret all men carry and hide even from their own conscious selves.  In a few hours I will touch its shores, hesitant, like a palm gracing the mattress where old love was made and left to ruin.

                I have become what most fear becoming, a bag of bones with a past he wants to shed, a present he can’t stand, and a future with no hope or chance of redemption.  You grow up thinking that there is no corner in life, that even the worst decisions can be redeemed, but that’s not true.  You can wreck it in a single moment, all because you decided to cash out your heart for something rational, something material, something obsessive, or something cruelly beautiful, only to become a twisted loyal dog to the Svengali of your own decay. 

                But in the end it all comes down to this. Logic is wonderful- two plus two is four, the earth revolves around the sun, what goes up must come down- but it’s useless script, materialism is a façade, the makeup runs, and money is only inked, processed pulp, and in the end we all inevitably die and when we die, what is left? I discovered this or that, I wrote this or that, I built this or that, and I became this or that?  Or I loved and I loved and I loved and there she is, lying right beside me, sharing my bed of nails, my toxic chalice, and this is all I’ve ever wanted or needed and when death comes we will not fear, knowing that love, unlike all else, will carry on and on, like an echo unbecoming into eternity. 

 

                Aden stood against the doorframe thinking about the delicacy of language and conversation.  Cale had blown it all in a few words, in syllables; in malleable sounds we give bare meaning to vent the inexplicable.  But words are dead and unfeeling; they exist as subconscious exhaust, as skeletal fragments of what we really mean.  Most of what we experience in life is outside of language, beyond it- wordless.  And we struggle constantly to share those experiences with others because we are collective beings and we find sanctuary in the illusion that at least someone else understands, that they know what we feel, and that they are suffering like us, all the same.  And when we want to love and be loved, when we feel passion and desire, we desperately slave away trying to shove all our emotion into the casket of the spoken and written word, often failing, because you cannot cup the ocean in the palm of your hand.

Cale’s drunk didn’t help either and Aurora, of course, probably assumed the old Proverb- “That a drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts”.  But words betray thoughts and thoughts betray words.  Aden knew that wasn’t what Cale really meant, that it was a sliced valve, and like any heat of the moment when the confusion and pain bullet like torrents under breaking ice, we often b***h without meaning, bloodletting to strip ourselves of disease without realizing we’re committing verbal suicide.

It’s unfair, Aden thought, words are lifeless, they cannot feel, they cannot think, chose, or conceive, but still, we give them the authority to govern the tide of our inexpressible beings.  Words are only vehicles employed to dump the waste, salvo our enemies, and soften the walls of those we love.  If anything, there is more raw truth to be found in how a man looks you in the eye, palms a drink, or stands in the rain, than in any intimate hour long conversation.

‘If you want to know a man.’ Aden’s father would say ‘listen to him when he’s quiet.’  

Aden left the doorframe and collapsed on the worn sofa in the living room.  He found the Sepia Wittgenstein philosophy poster taped over the bamboo glass sliding doors to the kitchen and studied it in the soft moonlight- ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’.

Words drowned Cale tonight, simple words…

Aden opened his notebook on the coffee table, found a blank page, and let the pen bleed his thoughts.

 

The delicacy of conversation, of language, of words- of the chamber where our writer hacks up tuberculosis blood on crowded paper, where the sage lies on a hammock in mistaken content somewhere in the corner of this circular room, and where the political animal barks in brick down the barrel of an elephant gun we often forget to powder up and pull the trigger.

 

            Aden shut the book and sank into the cushions while the knot in his stomach began to tighten, knowing that underneath it all, words weren’t the only ones playing Iscariot tonight. 

What had he done?

What had he not done?

                He should have pounded some common sense into Cale.  He should never have let him call her.  But why didn’t he? So what, Cale would have been pissed off at him for a night, maybe thrown a fist, maybe stormed off somewhere else, but tomorrow the smoke would have cleared and all else would have been saved.

                Aden knew what part of the reason was and damn himself for it.  He’d always envied Cale and Aurora because they had something between them he’d never felt.  He said he didn’t really believe in love anymore but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to believe again.  And what he saw between Cale and Aurora made him doubt his pessimistic faith constantly. 

                Before Aurora, Cale had been closer to him than any other human being, but now, she had a part of Cale that Aden would never see or understand and he hated her for that.  She could drive Cale to make the most of himself simply by being, whereas Aden would have to hound him night after night to break his idle depression. 

                Sure, Aden was jealous of her, she’d saved Cale in a night, gave him reason enough to live again, something Aden had tried for months after Cale had slipped beneath the water.  But now Aden was the one falling away with nothing and no one like Aurora to hold his head above water.

                Damn, was it that then?  Did he really want to see Cale hang himself tonight? Well he got what he wanted, now what, now f*****g what!?

                He kicked his notebook off the coffee table and dragged himself over to the window. 

It was a soft night.  The curtain was half-drawn, the street a pale blue.  Bodies sat across the street grilling swogogee, garlic, and kimchi, pounding soju, laughing, fading.  He wondered how many lives had sat around that same table, in that same place, living, dying.       

            Nothing mattered.

                We’re born. We live. We die. And the world turns and turns and turns.

                Shakespeare’s last words: ‘He dies.’

                Nothing really matters.

                Aden turned away from the window to the little world he and Cale had built for themselves out of Indie posters, a pine book shelf stuffed with thoughts, tacked up world maps, and street market nick-nacks.  He hadn’t even read half the books they kept in that shelf, neither had Cale, it was all for show, all for desperate show. 

                Why?

                I mean nothing really mattered.

                What was it for? Self-affirmation? Ego satiation? Or was it like a name- a wad of letters trying to camouflage the scattered human underneath it all?

                Whatever.  It didn’t matter.

                Aden felt asphyxiated in this apartment, he needed air and open space, he needed to wander around for a little while and lose himself.  He grabbed his jacket, scooped his notebook off the floor, and moved for the door, lingering for a heavy minute by Cale’s door, listening.

                He heard him snoring under Bon Iver and slipped inside.  Cale was passed out, still dressed, tear stains like chalk marks down his face.  Aden slid his shoes off and pulled the Kashmir blanket overtop him. 

                Damn me for dragging him out here, Aden thought as he left the room.  He should have told Cale to stay put, to stick with Aurora; the world will always be here to scope out and see.  But he’d sold Cale out.  Aden had come to Korea before Cale to teach and hating the foreign crowd convinced Cale to join him.

                So what? So Aden could have company and Cale lose the love of his life? Damn him.

                He shut the door, donned his coat, and drifted into the stairwell.

                But what is love worth anyway, he thought before sinking into his own past flings.  He’d been a picky lover all his life- picky because he was shy, picky because he was uncertain, picky because he’d been afraid of commitment all his life, picky because he’d always had some unreal ideal lover in the back of his mind, picky because his expectations were always shattered- or was being picky an excuse for his lack of lovers.

                His first real love was in high school, an Italian-American girl.  She had fire in her, she turned heads, she sunk the world with her footsteps, she kept him on his toes, she made him feel like dusk might bring the sun and dawn the moon.  They should have been, he knew that, he felt that, and he realized that even at forty he’d probably still scrape her picture out of the bottom of some decrepit pile and lose himself in the first set of eyes that ever made him fall away.  He still wore her bracelet at times, the rope twine she gave him before he left to school, the same rope twine bracelet lovers would make their sailors before they left to sea.

                His second real love was in college.  They’d never dated but she showed him the other side of the world, the color in the dark side of everything, the raw copper outside of the coin.  They’d smoke and sit on an old dock and blow bubbles and watch them bounce off the lake and laugh at the absurdity of everything and drift away from the world and all the hosh posh of being and dying and living.  She’d given him a Buddhist prayer bracelet, on the beads were carved prayers to save one from being stuck up on lost love.  Aden never understood it, then one day she was gone, and that was that. 

He’d never even worn the bracelet. 

                Or loved again for that matter- whatever that was anyway.

                And imagine, he used to be the one who believed in it all, Cale was the skeptic.  He could see him now with his legs dangling off the shed roof as he sketched new constellations in the stars, swearing ‘You’re just like everyone else, obsessed with this crazy notion that there’s this someone out there or this something-’

‘Come off it, wait-’

‘No let me finish.’

It’s funny now looking back at the memory and seeing Cale pulling himself onto his elbows with this serious oil stain in his eyes.

‘You’re like everyone else, playing couple in cute acoustic cafes, making deep love to reggae and incense like it’s ethereal, imagining that as a human you’re separate from the biological fact that we are only living matter programmed to f**k and eat and s**t.’

‘You know that’s horseshit, that’s not the love I’m talking about, that’s all shallow nonsense.’

‘Then what is it Tom Stoppard? What is love?’

Aden studied the empty space between the stars, it reminded me of his past lovers- their faces, their laughs, their flaws, the sharper brushstrokes in their being- and he tried to fill it in, but there was no room, not in that in between.

‘I still don’t know-’

‘Exactly.’

Cale stammered and lay back down.

‘How about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘What happens when you fall in love?’

Cale laughed and reached for a cigarette in Aden’s pocket.

‘You can say I told you so.’

 

I told you so…

 

But had he?

Cale had fallen into something deeper, something indefinite, something timeless.  But how?  He’d been so adamant about remaining a bachelor until he died and steel in his conviction that love was like a pretty Hallmark card it now made Aden question his own resolution against love. 

Question?

It’d never been much of a question.  If he bled the truth, it’d show thin doubt.  Like Cale once, perhaps for the same reasons, he just couldn’t face believing in something that everyone else seemed to feel but he didn’t, in cowing down to some confection animal instinct, in hoping all the bullshit of this show might be worth putting up with just because he’d fallen head over heels for some other dying body, and he was afraid of waking up one morning in some suburban manor with a 9-5 office job, kids, black routine, and a wife with a collagen mask on trying to gut out all the wrinkles.  

But maybe it was that skepticism in love that finally made it real for Cale and led him to Aurora.  If, to some, it took a Judas to save humanity, maybe it’ll take some self-betrayal to redeem himself.

Aden clambered down the stairs, through the car park, and out into the street.  The Korean men still sat around the table drinking and smoking, filling the settled night with intoxicated laughter.  He drifted by, hands pocketed, thoughts heavy.

Cale had messed around for years, going from girl to girl, not in the sense that he was trying to add notches to his belt, no, he never bragged about it, but he’d never told any of them he was in love, he never chalked out poetry with a raw heart, he never lost a night to restlessness, his eyes sticky-tacked to the ceiling, muddied up by something inexpressible, caught in the coquette color of her.

Or maybe Cale had, he’d just been good at stowing away all that surface feeling and electric water, and maybe Aden didn’t really know him as well as he thought he did.

Or had Cale just never felt real love until Aurora?  Then is finding real love the problem? Or is it learning how to keep love real?

Today people just pitch their love into everything and nothing, sleeping around, shelling out piece of heart for piece of a*s, falling in and falling out.  Maybe that has nothing to do with these times. Maybe that’s just human.  Being so goddamn desperate for anything.

Aden descended into the subway station with swollen steps, passed the pastry stand underground where a man sat thumbing through a yacht catalog, like he did every day, probably thinking to himself this time next year, just one more year- this will be a good one, I know it, I feel it- just one more year before he looks up and he sees himself sailing around Jeju Island in the ribbon station light, passed the university sign handing out dream tickets to the high school students coming back from a late night in the library tube-feeding off text, passed the cosmetic billboards with still pretty faces promising the thick-boned girl on the bench across the way that she could be beautiful, that she could be loved.

So this is life. Yacht dreams, Avalon, brand name jeans, tattoos, favorite novels, doctorates, cult films, band t-shirts, political slogans, prayer, faith, love.  It’s all just street clutter thought up by desperate people, bought by desperate people, applauded by desperate people, worn by desperate people, all sharing that same struggle of trying to cope with who they want to be and what they aren’t, of what they wish they were and what they wish they could have been, of wanting to love and wanting love.  And in the end, everyone’s the same; the surgeon with his glass green house and timeshare in Guyana, the waitress in the back room trying to finish school and hoping the Morning After pills work, the father who holds his child for the first time- they’re all clambering for a bit of that and a bit of this to feel like they’re finally worth something after all.

Aden climbed into the last car and studied the other worn faces, the old woman with her tired eyes bagged and half-shut, the young couple quiet, staring at the far wall, seemingly holding hands because it’s expected, because they don’t want to tumble down the chute alone, the college kid shuffling through his iPhone, collar popped, skinny boot cut jeans, skipping from pose to pose because he’s so goddamn chained to self-consciousness he’s uncertain of how to stand in a near empty subway car late at night.

Aden just wanted to understand the world around him, the little details that truly defined our day, the small things we never really question because we’re too busy wrestling with crap we’ll never understand.  Aden didn’t care if there was a god or where the universe came from, he just wanted to know what made people happy? Why does he smile when she kisses him? What is romantic in a flower? Why does a bubble amuse a child? Who decided what is proper and why? When we should eat? How we should behave?

It wasn’t that goddamn much to ask really, he figured it should be his right to know.  After all, he’d been pitched into this bull arena without a clue as to why and without any say in whether or not he wanted to be a part of it all.  It’s not fair; we all get inevitably mauled in the end, and for what?

Christ, he didn’t even demand as much as Cale when it came to knowing what the f**k was really up.  Cale had become obsessed with the origins of the universe, with religion, with knowing.  He clambered over theory after theory, finally damning whoever created this world and decided survival should be a founding block for existence and destruction and finality a formidable element in the cycle of living, breathing, thinking beings.  But all that was before he met Aurora and became content with not knowing, only with existing.

Religion, cosmology, none of it ever really appealed to Aden, it took a certain caliber of ego to invent, let alone meddle in or believe any of that.  I mean, what kind of a person is arrogant enough even to assume they’ll ever fully comprehend the chorus of a turning stream down the spine of a mountain, Aden wondered.

But there he was, tripping into hypocrisy again; he was a writer for Christ’s sake, what kind of a person is arrogant enough to assume they can trap all the color and feeling in this world in written language? Besides, he’d treated art, philosophy, and literature no different in terms of aesthetics and truth from how Cale treated mathematics, music, and religion.

Whatever.

He wanted off this steel coach, he wanted a bit of fresh air again and some salt moonlight.  He got off at the next stop somewhere on the outskirts of downtown and ascended back onto the streets.  The neon lights dressed the city in circus nylon while a group of drunks staggered down the gutter, chain-smoking and badgering the taxi drivers waiting on their aluminum hoods for any ticket to ride, and somewhere the echo of sweaty club music, pulp bass, and street traffic railed against the char grey walls, leaving sound stains on the stillness that should come with the night.

How could people stomach the city?

He didn’t have a clue, but what would it matter if he did.

It’s all whatever.

Aden was getting too tired to care, too jaded from questioning to question anymore, and feeling too old to be this young, it’s beautiful because it is, leave it be, ‘everything saves beauty alone’…

But beauty was becoming extinct, from the city, culture, and civilization, thought Aden, this is why we’re losing it, we’ve replaced natural beauty with cement, pixels, and tar.

Whatever.

He just wanted a coffee.  Black, no sugar.  And a cigarette.

Coffee and cigarettes, he laughed to himself, keep the little humans off their toes.

There was a good joint further in, called the English Book Café or something rather, that he and Cale used to go to to read and use Wifi during the winter time to save money on gas from trying to heat their flat.  Cale did two or three gigs there with some drum circle but it wasn’t paid and there never was much of a crowd.  Great place to trade in paperbacks, find weathered classics and Lonely Planet guides, and sip on caffeine and silence, and that was that, but that was all Cale wanted right now, nothing more, nothing less.

But he’d walked a block passed the turn and not wanting to look like an awkward fool, to god knows who, kept going until he reached the corner where he pretended to peer down the street for something or someone before nonchalantly pivoting and heading back down the block.

What the hell am I doing? Aden damned himself and lit up a cigarette.  I can’t even turn around on a street without wondering if the stranger behind me might care.  It’s no different from the kid who pretends he’s talking on his cell because he can’t cope with looking like he might be alone. 

Aden hated himself- how easily distracted he was, how much of a hypocrite he was, his indecisiveness when it came to doing anything and everything, how he created excuses for not doing this and not doing that, and all his stupid absurd quirks like not knowing when to turn around after passing the wrong turn. 

God, how he could walk around criticizing the rest of the whole damn world for being plastic and self-conscious and this and that but who was he really and how was he different.  And he couldn’t change himself, ever; this was who he was, this was the skin he wore, and this was the face he should have left by the door.  

Or was that just another excuse?  Probably just another excuse like everything else, but what did it matter if he changed or not, he’d still have flaws, people don’t change anyway really, you are who you are who you’ve always been and always will be.

And ain’t that a damn shame.

Aden tried to change before, he’d been an optimist once and a passionate dreamer trying to achieve things, trying to work for something, trying to become someone, but every time he took a step it seemed the whole damn world would come crashing down on him and then what was it worth? For every rose petal is half a dozen thorns.

Or maybe he’d only ever really half-assed that attempt to change, maybe he enjoyed sulking and bitching and reveling in the dark, maybe he was a sadist, maybe we’re all sadists, we all enjoy thorns and drama and fresh tears on worn pillows because we’re so goddamn caught up feeling sorry for ourselves.

No, no, he really did try once, he did, but where do you go with a dream? Where do you take it? How do you bend passion into metal? Doesn’t actuality ruin fantasy by falling short in expectation anyway? Besides, it seems like only luck and time drop coins into the right lap, and it’s just as much the choice you didn’t make as the choice you made that unravels where you gradually go in life.

Or maybe Aden was becoming hackneyed from being, from breathing, from shitting and eating and sleeping and feeling.  What left was there in life? More color? More sounds? More harmonic chords, delicate brushstrokes, shore breezes, autumn afternoons, chocolate frosting?  Sensation was no longer a thrill but a becoming curse and like an overused toy, the novelty of it was evaporating quickly with time.

And depression, anger, jealousy, frustration, pleasure, humor, curiosity, like all the rest of the inexpressible warm water of our lives was, for Aden, becoming nothing more than scratched vinyl on repeat, a ball and chain of dry ice and feeling, and a constant disappointment.

And love-

Aden lingered in the doorway and brushed away the thought before dragging himself up the five flights of rosin steps to the attic café.  The atmosphere was lose and empty as an autumn sunset without the promise of garden weather, or a fresh, unused casket.  Tattered beatnik posters and water color portraits clung like hard scabs to eggshell paint while Horse Feathers fell in scattered notes through abused amps escorting pale fingers as they slowly touched sandpaper tongues and turned ratty dog-eared novels written by dead men overdosing on their desperate bids to crown beauty, each killed eventually by their own talent. 

Aden followed a row of anthropology anthologies to where a young Korean in a honeycomb V-neck shuffled through an iPod behind a makeshift countertop cluttered with pots, calculators, notepads, felt tip markers, and drum sticks.

“Regular Americano.”

“Sugar?”

“No thanks.”

“3000 Won.”

He smiled weakly, paid, and left to use the bathroom in the hall just outside the café.

God, why couldn’t he appreciate life? Why did he have to hate so damn much?

Aden caught himself in the splintered mirror hanging over the wash basin and felt his face, his mother’s Roman nose, her green eyes- that was all he recognized of hers from the photos and home videos.  He wondered what she would have been like, how she sounded when she laughed, and what she might have said to him during all those years.  Or even now, what would she say to him now as he stood here, swamped and jaded, with little enthusiasm left for life.

He also wondered what else she left him personality-wise, perhaps the depression, the darker side, was that hers? Or was that really his father and the loss of his mother only another layer of added sorrow?

‘Aden, do you know what made your mother? She couldn’t even cry without a smile.’ His father would laugh and say, but Aden wondered how much it took her to constantly cling onto optimism and how much black ice really lay underneath.   

When he was younger he would ask his father about her and his father would laugh and close whatever Silverstein book they were reading and tell him a story, or talk about one of her quirks, about how she hated light purple, flower-scented soap, and hospital corners on beds, then turn off the light and describe her in the darkness, her sea glass eyes, rye hair, skin soft as cotton snow, and Aden would fall asleep with her painted somewhere within the ceiling and the in between.

But he’d been cheated out of a mother, out of understanding a part of himself, and out of seeing what love meant between two inseparable lovers.

‘Aden, if it’s real, love is always too much, far too much for life.’  His father would say before disappearing down to the dock to watch the sun sink like they used to long ago when the world was still safe for young lovers and death seemed like it might end up as a broken, petty promise instead of an absolute certainty.

“One regular Americano, no sugar.”

Aden returned to the counter, grabbed his coffee, found a seat in a thatched chair in a far corner, and amused himself with profile sketches of the other bodies lounging about, sipping on hot drinks, reading, and chatting.

The geeky guy in his cord button-up and Manchester scarf with flat wound fingers from late nights playing blues guitar and probably obsessed with shows like the Wire, quite obviously infatuated by the gritty Kills doll sitting across from him talking too much, cursing too much, talking too loudly about too much of this and too much of that and of course she has no idea he’s in love with her and if she did she’d probably just shrug and quote Blondie or say something about Breakfast in Tiffany’s.

The Greenwich type girl on the sofa alone thinking she’s deep because she dresses Bohemian and reads French novels, but really she carries around all these intolerable habits that piss everyone off like never being able to finish a damn sentence or always eating the middle of the brownies and leaving the s****y crust or always acting like whatever she says is gospel.  One day, all those cups of coffee and sleeping meds she uses to sedate or overdrive that matter-of-fact will probably kill her, gradually, like any other mild addiction.

The Yuppie posse around a round table by the Grisham section busy contemplating intriguing stuff like Van Gogh and that brain disease of his, probably guilty of pitching pointless Latin like ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ around for high brow s***s and giggles or humming Radiohead casually in the line at Starbucks while waiting for Venti Caramel Lattes.

The-

But then he stumbled over her sprawled out on a sofa against the back wall, her chucks kicked up onto an Ottoman, donning a Navy blue hoodie and headphones, thumbing through what he thought was some Emily Bronte novel, and he couldn’t help but stare as if she were the only color he’d ever seen.

He turned away quickly when she looked up and fidgeted with his notebook and pen, scribbling the ineligible as smokescreen to make it look like he didn’t notice, he didn’t care, that he wasn’t really there.  But he felt like a child, his heart at the slots, maybe it wasn’t her, maybe if he just slid the pen aside, looked up, and acted like he was casually sporting the café for light inspiration-

But she was gone.

Aden glanced about the café desperately, the faces, bookshelves, and lights bleeding away, becoming bland and meaningless in his bid to shovel her out of the sand, but she had come and gone- again.

What was he thinking anyway? What was his fascination, his attraction, the underlying current that seemed to fetter him every damn time he just happened to catch a glimpse of her?  It was only horseshit and hormones, a quick rush and want because he was so damn alone, an infatuation with a rose phantom, that’s all, nothing more, nothing less.

He shrugged it away, maybe she was never really there, but when he looked back at the sofa where she had lied one last time he found her book still sitting on the cushions.  She’d forgotten it and she’d come back, and then maybe he would pass her by and say something, maybe.

Aden waited, penning nonsense to kill the time, but the minutes slugged on like city traffic and she still hadn’t come back.  He wondered if she really had forgotten her book, maybe he could pick it up and find a name or a number or ask the cashier if she knew who this girl was.

He stood up and walked over to the sofa, leafing through her peppered copy of ‘The Wuthering Heights’.  All her notes in scribble winding like ivy on a lattice along the page columns.  It made him laugh; she was just as scattered in her Tetris reflections as he was.

                “Do you know who that girl was on the sofa earlier?”

                “Mm.” The cashier looked up from her phone.

                “The girl on the sofa, she left her book.”

                “I don’t remember her name, she comes her every now and then though, you could leave it with me?”

                Aden hesitated, thumbing from front to back trying to find a name, a number, anything.

 “She just left?”

“Yeah.”

“Could try and catch up with her, if not, just leave it here.”

Aden closed the book and eyed the doorway.  He wasn’t sure he’d be able to catch her now; nearly ten minutes had crawled by.  It made him angry, how only ten minutes could flood a moment like this.

“I guess I could.” But it was worth a try, it wouldn’t hurt to try, and if nothing came of it, so what, he’d leave the book and move on, as if he had any other choice.

Aden grabbed his stuff and blitzed down the stairwell, nearly crashing into someone else as he leapt into the street.  Now which way? God, he had no idea, what a fool he ever was thinking he’d be able to even find her in this city.

He placed his bet on the corner down by Communes where most of the ex-pats and foreigners caught taxis home.  Doubling his pace to a near jog, he split by the closed shops and dark windows as a light rainfall started to grace the twilight city.  Then his thoughts started to clip into place, ice cube reason chilling the daisy chain tumbler of his rash emotions.  It wasn’t like him, to just up and gun after some random anybody to cash out on a plea for fate, to let himself slip into something as pathetic as this, and he probably looked quite the fool.

Aden stopped on the corner and looked around, pacing the sidewalk and craning to see around the signs and idle taxis.  He caught a figure he thought might have been her and started forward, but when they turned around it was just another stranger, everywhere strangers, and nowhere her.

The rain picked up and fell in sheets, ringing off the pavement like rice on tin foil.  He felt heavy, all else lost, and he could only hide the book under his jacket away from the storm and drag his rutted self toward a taxi.

Figures, he thought, foolish to think otherwise, chasing after her, even bothering with the effort of it all, letting himself go all to pieces and ruin for a pathetic chance, and why? Why, why, why? He didn’t even know the girl.

Whatever. The world turns and turns and turns.

With swollen eyes and damp hair, he leapt over the gutter already pregnant with white water and shoved his body and misery into the back of a cab.