the city and its furor.

Oh, Autumn.

I love the taste of caramel and the smell of cinnamon. They remind me of home and the feeling this time of year used to bring. We had so many apple trees in the side yard of the house I grew up in—they were what I looked forward to after all of our blackberries and mulberries had gone. We would pick the apples and bake them into pies—I can still see the whole process in front of me, and it leaves me feeling a bit sad. Why is it that this nostalgia always leaves me with a pit in my stomach? I think I may need to watch a movie where everything turns out all right, you know, one that makes you feel better until you fall asleep and wake up again. 

Lace Bottoms.

She always kept her journals—thick stacks of ink soaked paper, bound by leather and tucked tightly into cardboard boxes that collected dust underneath her bed. And once she filled another up she would squeeze the binding, kiss the cover, and send her sweet thoughts to exile with all the others. Though it would not be the entire truth to say that all of her thoughts were sweet. The dim light would flicker over her desk as she worked through the days in her mind, kneading the truths like dough until she remembered them just as she wanted. ¶On one particular Wednesday night she opened the window over her desk and let the hot air in. Summer had tried to strangle her for months, but it was now indecisive and washed out, though its heat still lingered. She pressed her pen to the page and watched for a moment as the ink flowed through the fibers of the paper. Slowly, in swoops and lunges, the pen took off. A smirk pierced through her lips as she thought of the conversation her mother forced upon her before she had the chance to rise out of bed that morning. ¶She was careful to not wake her lover when she first spoke because he was prone to a specific kind of grumpiness in the mornings, though not to outshine his casual indifference when lucid. Her mother, sipping tea and burning candles, had called to put the finishing touches on the plans for a vacation to the coast, but her true intensions—neatly wrapped like the white bow on a box from Tiffany’s—were to find a definition for the boy sleeping face down next to her daughter. It was not the ideal circumstance, but her daughter had proclaimed her affection for the boy, so she invited both of them to enjoy the sand and the white washed divides that made up the idea of their vacation home before the true end of summer. She humored her mother and said that she would ask him of his thoughts whenever it was that he opened his ears—less important were his eyes and especially his mouth if he had nothing pleasant to say. She knew that he would say yes if she asked while touching his skin, but she wanted him to want to say yes, so she again told her mother that she would ask. A skip and a jump. Kisses. With the conversation laid to rest, she fenced in the boy in her bed by wrapping her arms around him—rarer was it for his arms to wrap around her sleeping body. ¶It was late in the day before she rose. He had taken her car to work and left her in an empty bed. She would not be upset because she did not have to work that day, but she was sad that he did not wake her to (at the very least) tell her that he loved her. She did not move for hours. The sun was closer to its exit when she finally tore the heavy covers off of her body. Goosebumps immediately spread across her like a plague. She quickly found a robe to mask her air conditioned first world problems of the late August afternoon. The couch invited her in as she thought of her day. She had the intention of waking early and writing, but it never really happened, and she never really felt guilty even though she considered herself to be a writer, an advocate for the language she told everyone that she loved. This was no matter though because there was still time left. Time to write and to think and to dream and to love and to grab ahold of life as if it were on purpose. ¶She had tried to write for five hours before she realized the sun had set. Her prose and poetry was restricted or bound and she assumed it was due to a lack of inspiration, so she drank. She knew few other women that drank J&B while wearing lace bottoms. She was a pioneer, a rebel of sorts! And so she began to write in her journal because she was never at a lack of words when she was centered on thoughts of herself. She was successful and her mother was kind. The boy that sleeps next to her was more than just the boy that sleeps next to her. She smiled more and meant it. There were plans and commitments to followthrough. The words were beautiful and bold and daring because they could exist in that fashion because she knew that no one would ever read them after she bound them up and tucked them away, hiding the part of herself that had ambition and hope within paragraphs and punctuation where they would be safe, where she could revisit them later. A squeeze and a kiss and another stack of bound thoughts was ready to be hidden from the world. But there was solace in the fact that she created those thoughts—at least thats what she told her self as she forced her lies into an overstuffed cardboard box.

Best Intentions.

“I know I can do more. I need to do more.” Her words already echo as they enter my ears—they carry passion but as each word slowly fades off into the distance I begin to wonder if her actions and followthrough will follow suit. She wipes her cheek because we both know tears don’t go over so well in restaurants.

The waiter comes and goes as he pleases. He removes the half empty plate of veggies and hummus. He leaves the bowl of black bean soup and the reuben. The glasses of water don’t refill themselves. He clears the table and sets a whiskey on the rocks in front of me. She still has her water. 

“You know what I was thinking about earlier?”

I shake my head. “Not a clue.”

“As I was at DSW buying nike shoes I was thinking about cambodian children and I felt really terrible, but I had this gift card, so I was searching on the internet for which shoe brand does not employ children. I found nothing.” She takes a long, drawn out drink from her glass, but she still looks parched when she sets the glass back down. “I thought about what it would be like to be thrown out of DSW for telling a woman that she doesn’t know anything in front of her two children. I then thought about that scene in I Heart Huckabees where Mark Wahlberg is speaking to his daughter and says ‘little children make these shoes for ten cents an hour’ and she’s like ‘stop it, stop it.’ I envisioned the little children around me doing that and their mothers getting mad at me.” She lets out a little laugh, almost proud of herself.

I examine her from across the booth, my elbow resting on the table with my temple resting against my pointed forefingers, my thumb cocked. “Well why wouldn’t you really say that if that’s how you really feel about the shoes?”

“Because I’d be a complete hypocrite for standing in line at the checkout, holding the pair of nikes.”

“You’re not any less of a hypocrite when—”

“When I buy them.”

“No, when you don’t say it out loud.”

She bites her lip. She eyes her water before heading back in. “I was thinking, ‘God damn it, these ten-year-olds need to do some better stitching’ because if you look at these shoes, they’re not of good quality because ten-year-olds are making them for ten cents an hour. In cambodia. In the dark.”

“Truthfully, I can’t tell if you’re more upset that ten-year-olds made the shoes you’re wearing, or that the stitching is shitty.”

She smiles, but I can see the slight sadness behind her eyes. “I don’t know. I did look up fair-trade running shoes while I was standing in the store.” 

“Yeah, those are called feet.”

She laughs. “No, they make them. Eco-friendly, fair-trade running shoes.” She reaches across the table to hold my hand, but I pull back just before our fingers touch. Her brows tighten as her eyes send me her best intentions. “I’m an admitted hypocrite.”

“Yeah, well we’re all hypocrites at some point. If you can admit it, then doesn’t that make you stronger?”

“It makes me sad. I didn’t want to…”

“Are you afraid of what people will think about you if they knew you were a hypocrite?”

“No, it’s because it’s something I care about and I don’t want to continue to support that. The next pair of shoes I buy, I want them to be fair-trade running shoes.”

My eyes follow across the table to hers and she smiles, even through her fairly-fresh tears have yet to completely leave the conversation. I pull my eyes away from her and move them to my drink because that’s how our interactions always seem to go. A droplet of water runs down the side of my glass—condensation from the ice as it slowly melts into the whiskey it floats on top of. My right hand clasps the sweaty drink as my left holds down the wet napkin underneath so they may separate. My nostrils flair as I bring the whiskey closer to my mouth. 

Her chapped lips part. “It’s hard for me to share with you what I’m passionate about and what I want when you tare it all down and degrade everything and say it’s meaningless and that we have nothing in common because…” She shakes her head and stares at me with all of her urges to not weep. “Because I care about more than just that and sometimes that makes me think, ‘should I not be caring about this?’ and then I think ‘I really don’t know anything,’ and that’s unfortunate.”

I have the urge to say something witty or to just pay the bill and leave, but the urge to tip my glass back even farther is far greater and far warmer.

Birds.

The birds must fly south for the winter, but the summer’s almost dead and we’re the birds that have not left because we still linger, and we’re still hoping that, one day, the summer will not end.

Truths.

• Me: Do you ever think about anyone other than yourself?
• Her: When I'm masturbating.

Youth.

but I remember when I was young and I was in a prayer circle one morning before classes started—this was a daily thing while I did my time as a catholic school boy in the early years of my youth, before all of my teeth had fallen out and grown back in. On this particular morning we were talking about death again. A classmate’s grandfather had died and the whole class seemed preoccupied with what death really was. But not me. I stared aimlessly across the room and out the window because, you see, I’ve always been preoccupied with life and I’ve always been curious, especially in my paste eating days. So we get to the point in the prayer circle where we’re all supposed to pray for someone or something. Of course, half the kids pray for dead relatives. That redheaded girl prayed for Jack to not die at the end of Titanic. Slowly but surely it was my turn and I paused. I had nothing to say. I had no one to pray for. There was nothing wrong in my life. There were no great tragedies that I carried with me. I was still young and naive. I was uneasy and unsure. I swallowed calmly and opened my mouth and

Heedless of attracting unwanted attention…

She sits across the table and keeps firing witty comments back at me—was she this funny before? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t give her my full attention back when it would have mattered the most. She knows me better than anyone and she’s the only person who’s heard all of my secrets, but that seems a bit irrelevant now as I try to apologize to her, not to ease my conscience, but because that’s what she deserves and is entitled to. I tell her about this song I wrote about her and think about that line I’ve been singing a lot lately that makes me sad and full of anger at the same time. She’ll probably hate it, but I’ll just write her another one that’s far more flowery and far less obnoxious. I tell her about the girl I fell in love with and the one that was practice and the other one that was too young to harbor anything realistic—she says I’m salting her. It makes me smile when I ask what she means by that (she mentions salt in wounds) because salt is funny when used as a verb. This makes me think that she’s a hell of a lot smarter than I thought and then I’m back to the idea that I should have paid her more attention—I should have showered her with all of my attention back when she would water me and have sex with me and water me and have sex with me and water me and so on and so forth, all in anticipation of me flowering into a real person with longings and real convictions and damn this girl is quick. Her tongue is sharper than the other’s and I took it for granted. Jesus. I’ll take short comings and regrets for two hundred. But no matter because it’s the present and I don’t fondle the what-ifs and could-have-beens. Instead I’ll just ask, who the fuck are you and why do I feel like this is the first time we’ve met?