... dinner.
(short today. I'm involved in a torrid book affair, don't expect much until I've turned the last page.)
There we were, stuck like unopened pages of a book I’m going to be cooped up with for the next many days. Locked in by conversations that neither of us wanted to bri – You know what, you’re drunk, give me your keys… -
…Unavoidable but most likely unessecary, minds were shouted in the quietest of voices, illustrated with eyes like wayward darts. It was like winning a debate for the side I didn’t believe in, or worse, on topic I knew nothing about and had won by default because the other team had drank too much the night before, been caught by chaperones and become disqualified.
Presented with a present that proves what I didn’t know - you listened, perhaps only once, but the one time that it was important. This fact made me wish I’d never brought it up, it made me think things could work. You and my conscious teamed up to drag it out of me, which in the end was probably for the best. Giving up was never a hobby of mine, but this time I know it was for the greater good. We will still be great. Good.
At an hour of the morning fit only for birds and baristas, I slid into a jacket that was once too big and locked the door behind me. I was still getting used to the air here, so different than it was where I grew up. Or, at least where I thought I grew up. I relocated to a place just like every other place everyone wants to go when they reach adulthood. Like most others, I arrived to find I was a child amongst countless other orphans and immature birds who had flown the nest early.
The first morning out of six that it wasn’t raining, as my umbrella sat idle in my bag. I was thankful, for I had other things to worry about than making sure my hair remained un-frizzed. I debated asking the prostitute on the corner of Guelph and Broadway how her night was, not out of any sinister intention, but just so she could make it through the day knowing someone put thought toward her well being. Her answer would have been irrelevant at the time, and it wouldn’t be until the day was through that we’d each realize that the morning’s inquiry changed our days and the way we thought throughout them. But I kept my mouth shut, unsure of whether or not I even had a voice today after the case each of cheap beer and cigarettes from the night before. I thought about the movie I’d watched with a friend two nights before, and how unfortunate it was that the lack of backstory made it impossible to know why everyone was so in love with the girl, or the idea of the girl who was found dead in a ravine during the first scene. I wanted to know who she was, where she came from and why she had such an apparently magnetic personality. Thanks to time restrictions and an inept director’s vision, I was left with only my imagination to try to figure it out. Maybe that was the point all along.
I imagined what my friends, few and far between and scattered across the country, were doing at this same moment. The city in which I owned keys to a house was the furthest west out of anywhere I had aquaintences. It made me feel lazy, as they’d already been up for hours, caring about prostitutes and cursing screenwriters under their whiskey breaths.