Letter 5/29/2016

How to Spend an Evening

Tuesday. Go outside to dry the cold sweats and shake off the boredom. See the street lights flicker orange and shadows of passing cars trying to reach inside your neighbor’s window. Decide to walk a little. Grab your wallet in case your body needs to be identified. Leave the lights on. Listen to something that makes you feel like music didn’t exist before you and live inside the secret of your self-obsession. Up the hill now, where commotion stirs and beckons you away from you. Left foot, then right, then left foot again. You want a cigarette in your head and in your hand, but not in your lungs and you wonder what to listen to, but you know which one you will. Watch the bearded mouths move of men with small bikes and cut off shorts. Scan for faces that make you feel safe. Around the corner, speak easy doors open to speak easy people and you feel quieter than ever, like you’ve unlearned language. You pass the place where the girl you love served you a pear salad and you thought back then that things could be normal again even though you hated pears. Push it down deeper. Walk to the rhythm of the song that’s playing now, more upbeat. Avoid the cracks and think briefly about a childhood lost. Think maybe you should work your calves more if they’re already this tired. Shift away. Lift your head. Focus on faces. Focus on being a piece of something that is more than just you. Smile at the sarcastic alcoholic that is your TA’s roommate. Ask for a cigarette because he smokes and he’s twice your age so why not? Stand outside the barbershop you took blurry black and whites of for a photography class in high school. Think about a made up life somewhere different. Exchange pleasantries. Puff yourself up. Become invincible. Say “yeah, man” a lot because you can’t stop and you wonder if you look like a d****e or if you can pull it off. Wonder what people are really like. Spanish guitar is playing in the bar where you made mistakes with the broken girl you met twice many years apart. Walk in and out of earshot again. Decide to be different with every step. Don’t even look across the street at the manicured lawn where mostly bad memories are buried. The cemetery where your sister’s picture was found against a tombstone feels safer. Keep moving towards the new development that reminds you of nothing and you like it for that. Ignore the street corner where you bled from under a sweatband and two black guys asked you to come smoke weed with them to make you feel better. Try to remember the memories that you aren’t trying to forget. Stop inside the gastropub that you’ve lived in and loved in for so long it has become a museum of your existence there. Hug the bartender. Wave to the little guy that works in the kitchen. Make them laugh. Feel good about yourself for a moment. Have a drink. Doubles for the price of a single and it makes you feel special. Have another. Forget about how you and her first locked eyes rolling silverware there at table 21 three summer’s ago. Have one more. Push it down deeper. Pay the tab and move on. Walk a little further. Left foot, then right. Breathe in the smell of the deep frier, freshly mowed grass, and your own skin. Feel the wet air push back against the breeze. Scan for safe faces. Find safety in strangers for a short while. Look at the black sky spin and wish that gravity worked on thoughts too. Keep moving. Walk straight. Away from everything until either the town gets smaller and disappears or you do.