Breathless (What Greg did one November night)

The fore-runner of my later poem, the Long Gone, stylistically, and thematically linked to a lot of my concentration on cheap teen romance.

10:00 PM

Running to her place around the corner after dusk in the glow of the streetlights, pockets of my jacket swaying, sweat chilling my brow in the cold November night, gasping, my breath a warm gray mist trailing back from me like a comet’s tail as I rush, rubber soles pounding the pavement, smacking the cracked black asphalt, over the road, along the gutter, hopping the stormdrains, no time for sidewalk as I round the bend in time to hear the tires of her parents’ station wagon pulling out, hitting THUD the pothole at the foot of the driveway and just missing me diving into the bushes and crawling past until I’m sure the red taillight has disappeared into the distance when I collapse on her porch and ring the doorbell, staring up at the shadows of moths dancing in the lantern,  when she answers the door I can’t be anything but what I am… breathless.

 

11:00 PM

I wanted to sneeze.  I wanted to yawn.  I wanted to never speak of this.  I wanted to pretend I didn’t spend an hour in her room, turning myself upside down; a hurricane of limbs.  We were in each others’ eyes, spinning, twisting in the wind.  I gasped.  We didn’t really know each other.  I didn’t really know myself.  I didn’t know what I’d done.  I didn’t have the nerve to ask if SHE knew what I’d done.  I should not have come.  She should not have stayed, if she was even there to begin with.  She asked me if I wanted a cigarette and I told her no but watched her smoke rings dissolve into the air near the ceiling, tempted but keeping my lungs clean in good faith.  I wrinkled my good jacket on her floor.  I wrinkled my nose when she asked me what I really wanted and when I faced her, without an answer pre-prepared for me, I could only clear my throat and sigh… breathless.

 

11:02 PM

I was about to climb out her small window and shimmy down her trellis when THUD I heard that bumper-scraping pothole sound and saw an angry red taillight pull back into the driveway, leaving its tell-tale trail of blackish exhaust smoke.  I should’ve jumped and hoped for the best.  I should have hit the ground running.  I should have not stopped ‘til I was safe on my doorstep.  I should have crawled into my bed and never spoken a word of this to anyone.  I should not have answered when I heard my name:  “Stephanie is Greg up there with you?”  I should have hid, like the monster I was, under her bed.  I should have put my shirt back on.  It was a cold November night and I could see myself exhale.  An angry father shoved me out the door and I tripped as I fell to the porch and got winded, hitting my sternum on the railing.  I lay there choking, shivering… breathless.