Jan 24, 2007

She’s growing weary of her location on the couch, so she gets up and runs the filter of her cigarette over the white film left on the magazine, not hoping for a miracle. Her friends eyes tell her to hold on while she grabs a cigarette of her own, hand in hand they seem ready for a miracle, or maybe just a sit on a step. Here she is again, sitting on that front step with nothing but a cigarette and a new friend. Her life demands a new language when she has too many worried thoughts to sort through, but on a night like this there are no thoughts really. She is just left with the intoxication of the smoke that controls her lungs, but she is free.

There’s a temper in her words as she banters the lovely with her new friend, waiting for her old friend to close the door and come down the stairs. Her friend stops and says, “most days aren’t card games, they are much more raw, and much less restricted.” She says it not with a sense of experience, but with a sense of what impending experiences might make her feel.

There’s beauty in the simplicity of not having to worry about the night. She recognizes the beauty in the yellow light inside. The West took the sun away, and she wants to go too. She can feel some form of memory in the voices of the naïve mothers as they advise their children to come inside because it’s getting late. She can hardly remember back to a time when eight o’clock was considered late.

She feels the cigarette between her fingers as it slides through her lips with the words and the gin, and realizes that she has no more room for teenage antics. There is a sense of freedom and age in the steps she takes to the nearest bar with her old and new friend. It seems like the greatest, but most reluctant feeling in the world. It’s nearly impossible for her to allow herself to feel even modestly happy. She has tried, in her way, to be free. And now she can feel it in everything.

And aint it great, the feeling of having nothing but borrowed clothes on your back and a friend in your hand. For a minute, she knows she has everything. A flower in her hand and all the time in the world. There’s no more room for outrageous antics, and that’s a stability that her heart is beginning to accept.

              Salty words don’t make a pretty paragraph.