Roads
Ten people I knew in the world survived, although knew is a strange word to describe them. The ten, well I knew them in that face in the crowd sort of way, not the kind of knowing that carried any weight of consequence, or care. The girl who’d rung up my morning coffee every day, the one with the pierced lower lip who had fought every Wednesday with her boyfriend on her mobile. She would try to text him back, unnoticed, her hands underneath the counter, but she would give it away, mouthing each word as her thumbs slammed the tiny keys in anger. She is among us now. The boyfriend may be here, as well, come to think of it, though it’s hard to know for sure. That kind of distinction has become hard to recognize. Coupling lines blur, and bodies cling, without much regard to any propriety of love.
There is that boy I dated once. For a week, I think. He had a summertime green tint to his once blonde strands back then, the tell-tale sign of an Orange County boy with too much time on his hands, and chlorine soaked into his hair. We drove to Santa Monica once. He sat under the pier with me while I’d come down off one of my latest and greatest drug-fueled escapades. He’d let me scream into his hands, and I’d let him slip his dick inside of me. A fair trade, it had seemed at the time. I tossed his number into the third bin from the left, behind his apartment, as I walked home with sand itchy on my skin. I wonder if he still tastes of Peppermint Schnapps and Marlboro Lights, and if he does, would he be willing to share.
The rest are nameless. Images peeled off of a blueprint memory, faces from train passes and elevator rides, doctor office receptionists and that barely recognizable gas station attendant who used to sing Foreigner's Urgent out loud, and sold me discounted cigarettes with his number tucked inside once. It is hard to tell if they recognize me, or what stories they try to attach to my skin, pinned on like a kindergarten reminder. We all forget everything eventually, or at least feign at it, posed and smiling as if all this dark is just the contents of a normal day. Anymore now they all back away and shield their eyes from mine, afraid that the things I see above will rub off on them, poison the well, so to speak. They huddle in misconceived safety and try to re-write the world. I am not interested in any of the fabrication.
I used to be the girl in the back of the class chewing her nails, and looping letters into lyrical refrains. I would have traded my Grandfather's bicentennial coin collection to live within the confines of a song back then. Clumsy and awkward, gifted my life span's height before I hit puberty, towering over all the skinny blondes who fit into that Everybody Wants You mold. My first sexual experience had been with a shy boy two years my junior, his braces had left tears in the inside of my bottom lip, and he had kissed with as much grace as two elephants with tied-together trunks.
Most days I was just invisible, fading into the grey walls and missed opportunities. It was hard to grow up amongst the beautiful people when my body screamed ordinary, and hopefully refundable. Now my invisibility is just their desperate grasps at denial. No one cares to admit cowardice, or to look the community martyr straight in the eyes. Even the ones who empty and re-fill my veins avert their gaze, leaving gashes in my arms, but nothing more. Or the ones no one mentions, the ones who gave me this job in the first place. They send in their troops when my head is blood loss fuzzy, their masks barely registering in my view, just the sharp sting of what they take from my body as I lie there motionless, more dead than the last time. It was one of them who gave me my afterworld name. I can still hear it slithering out of his razor thin lips, burning my skin as he pressed his lips much too close to my ear. We all have them, new names, all the old ones tossed aside like regret, like yesterday.
None of us are who we were before.
