street lights

in which I reminisce about a near perfect weekend that feels too long gone.

I spent about seventy-five percent of the weekend with my best friend. We drove out to R’s and met her ridiculous and bitey puppy and it’s been a long time since I’ve been so instantly in love; Da Vinci sits when I snap now and I guess it only took a sleepless night entangled with too-big Black Lab limbs and a warm nose on my collarbone to forge that kind of bond. 

Worth it. 

We watch movies S can quote verbatim with even a little bad Gaelic thrown in and he says disturbing things about King Fergus just for the look on my face. Our toes touch beneath two blankets because he’s terrible at sharing; he’s warm and I’m freezing and it’s a little perfect and cozy, the three of us there in R’s living room picking apart the flaws in this movie he loves so much as I nurse my first half of an energy drink ever that tastes like root beer. 

We argue about the credits song and I let him have it because of that stupid look I never have an argument against. 

R has Disney Scene It which is just too perfect for words - I have owed them this Disney movie marathon - whatever other kind of movie weekend were we going to have? - for more years than I want to talk about. S reveals to having finally sat through all of Tangled, up till which he’d decidedly disliked it much to my intense horror. I smile so big my face hurts.

The only people I allow myself to scream and curse unabashedly at are S and R. The game dissolves quickly into a tense and too-loud competition; S is usually too-quick when we both know the answer, but I just barely scrap my first ever Scene It win. We keep hitting All Play just for kicks and S wins handedly, all while practically searing my eyelashes off with scandalized looks when I admit to not having seen even classics of classics like The Black Cauldron or the first Rescuers. 

After Brave is Dark Shadows, which I enjoy more than I thought I would - S loves almost everything Tim Burton and I find myself stopping in mid-sentence to admire certain fantastic cinematic choices, as I do. Even under the influence of at least four energy drinks, S crashes around 2 am as R and I sit up throughRobots, which I’d never seen. 

S, giving me that look again before settling into sleep, said I’d like it. 

Of course, I love it. 

Da Vinci is quiet and still for what feels like the first time since we’d arrived at R’s so many hours before. I’m surprised when, after driving him away from my pillow and settling down on the enormous air mattress, he presses himself up against my hip and lays his head down against my navel. 

He doesn’t try to bite me, which is a win for a lot more reasons than normal. My shirt doesn’t lay right and I can feel soft fur on my bare skin; I lay the blanket to cover him and he doesn’t object, just lays there breathing, until I have to take off my sweater from the heat and regret it when Da Vinci regroups further down the cool yellow sheet. 

“He’s really clingy,” R says, and I think she must know, since he is her puppy and I’ve only just met him at a few months old, but I can’t quite imagine what she means until when Robots is over and we’ve elected for sleep at God-knows-what o’clock in the morning. I lie awake in the almost dark, listening to S breathe on the couch above, looking at Da Vinci stretched out as a dark mass only a few feet away. 

I think he’s asleep but he’s not. 

I’m too surprised to do anything but stay very still as Da Vinci does the saddest puppy version of the worm I have ever seen, wiggling closer to me until his head finds purchase on my ribs, and with one last twist has glued himself to my side, one foreleg thrown over me like the errant arm of a sleeping lover; his nose is cool and damp just a breath beneath my chin.

I for one don’t sleep well - electronic lights are too bright blue and blinking, the fish tank stream excessive in the too loud quiet of these night hours. I try not to move too much, not because I’m afraid Da Vinci will react with his teeth, but because it has been long years since I have felt someone tucked solid and warm against me and that’s too sad a thought to just shatter in the dark. 

At some point I had to have fallen asleep because something is beeping and R is calling Da Vinci off of me and my head feels vaguely like it’s being slowly torn apart. It’s a no-sleep headache, one of my most favourite kinds, but it’s 8 am and we’re all up and S doesn’t have to dip out before 10. 

Hotel Transylvania it is. 

S wanted to go when it was released in theatres months ago, but of course I was the only one who would go with him. I was in France at the time of his despondence; we remember the conversation, but we’re here now is the unspoken sentiment. I realize that we’re probably never going to make it through a film without running commentary and I love my friends for it. 

When S slips out for a thing R and I watch Gilmore Girls, while I mix Honey Nut Cheerios with Honey Bunches of Oats and wonder to myself why I’d never tried that before. I keep practicing with Da Vinci’s discipline when it becomes clear that late night bonding does not trump early morning puppy energy.

S returns; there are pancakes and bacon, bilingual disney songs badly sung and another round of Scene It, in which I fail at thumb wrestling and staring contests and rock paper scissors, twice. S wins again. 

At the bulk grocery store I teach S the traditional New Year’s phrase in Vietnamese. I’m not even sure I’m right but he mangles it so little that laughter fills the spaces between the part of me that is touched. 

We watch The Lion King, an all-time favourite we all have in common. He insists that all could be avoided had Simba just run sideways from the stampede, of course, and at almost every joke we discuss at what age those jokes were understood, because we are all about to hit 21 and spend weekends watching films made for children. 

On the way to R’s I had launched yet again into a lack-of-license induced rage inflicted on me by my well-meaning but non-understanding mother; S had outlined his incredibly similar paternal experience and there had been this rush of relief and affection and gratitude. Here now in the dark of the car on the trip home, I ask him yet more questions about driving and try to talk about the whole thing in a way that doesn’t make me sound completely weak and idiotic. 

I probably don’t do so well. 

Familiar songs play in the car off S’s ipod; we talk Glee and real life and I admit for the first time something I am afraid to say to anyone who actually cares about Glee. A song he’d played me once here in the car a long time ago fades in - we sing quietly together and I’m surprised I can remember the lyrics.

I take in the sharp white streetlights fading back in the side mirror and then the warm older amber from the road straight ahead. I’m being lead home, literally and figuratively; I don’t even have to look at S to know that this, us, long drives on dark nights and the imperfect harmonies and all this time in the same space being together and better, this is the kind of relationship that people talk about, that Tumblr posts wrack up millions of notes for: the kind that is easy and good and right; a too large part of me is suddenly glad that S will literally never be interested so I don’t have to deal with the faint possibility that blue-grey nights offer up so temptingly. 

And it’s not until we’re in my driveway, when he gets out of the car to hug me when I ask, though he doesn’t want to move and hugs tight nonetheless, that I realize.

I’m luckier than I knew, and no red envelope will be worth this weekend.

Author's Note

if it doesn't make sense, that's probably because I wrote this at two in the morning and I'm literally just thinking about the weekend in a stream of consciousness - also it's a tumblr post from weeks ago. I'm cheating for my first piece of WC fiction aren't I?

Reviews

[s.r.knight]

You twat! You have no idea how far down the page it took me to realize who S was....wowwwww I'm ridiculously...well, dumb. I enjoyed the comedic style of your metaphors, we just really need to work on your punctuations ;) my Grammar 100 class will come in handy!