Funny Thing

A final hoorah.

We’d waited our whole lives for this.

Funny things is…

Now it seemed time was running out of pace.

Too fast for the rest of us

trying to dig our heels in

and possibly slow it down.

We just had to learn,

to take pictures.

Attempt to hold on to what we had.

Summer rolled around quickly,

I had only wanted to rid the churning in my stomach.

I stood still watching the things I loved the most

slip between my fingers.

No matter how tightly my hands were clenched.

She stood next to me as if to watch time run out.

It began to rain on our parade.

So we danced in empty parking lots.

Cigarettes in hand,

though you didn’t smoke

and she’d learned that night away from home.

We pretended not to care and eventually quit at one point.

The tobacco tasted of vanilla ashes.

We’d offered you one but you just said,

“No, I’d rather be drunk.”

Laughing we continued to dance.

Jenelise turned the radio to her car up.

Waving our arms in the air

we imagined several visually delicious guys…

correction.

Men.

Catering to us and admiring our milk carton shaped bodies,

as if they were anything but.

Two older men came along and watched us dance.

They admired Jenelise’s smile,

your moves,

my curvature for such stature.

They offered us your alcohol and you denied them

as the group’s spokesman in Spanish.

We watched the cars

hoping that the next one wasn’t your mother and father.

They were asleep and we knew it,

the paranoia just made it more fun

hidden behind that liquor store at eleven o’clock at night.

When our feet became tired we loaded up

and took you home.

Turning the music down as to not make your parents suspicious,

forgetting about the earlier art opening and poetry reading.

We watched you head up to an empty house

and sleep off a dancing hangover.

- Memory as Noted by Charlotte

Author's Note

Jenelise is pronounced Jenn-Elise.