Arrivals/Departures
So off I head, backpacked and prepared to have a sick lovely eveing. I scamper off to this friend's or that friends and I can't even believe at how lovely fortune can be sometimes, a beautiful girl just falls into your life like this and romance blooms and all the sublime oblivious things you think in your unjaded budding of your romantic life. I want so desperately by the evening to hear from her again and yet the call does not come. I leave a voicemail and a text, perhaps a bit much to a newfound interest, but for the intensity of our beginnings, it seemed like an understatement. I talk up the wonderful kind of "date" I've just had to one and every. It's the closest I've been to love in years, now in retrospect knowing that infatuation was all any ever were.
Nothing.
I lose it a little bit, and over the next few days I call a couple times and knowing it's slipping further and further, I realize something that I was surprised to realize. My jacket. It's been in her car and I would very much like it back.
A sweet peice of a jacket, I'd bought it off a man in a bar in my hometown for 20 dollars, a delightful metallic green, standing out with reflectors. The gaudy style that I still hold near to my punkish days and was only able to obain after it mattered, the coat that was center to a story all it's own that saw $60 of my dollars donated to a scamming guy with expired insurance who I rear ended and coerced me into a payoff for not wanting to "play games."
The jacket. It's important and I leave a careless message. Hey susan, I'd really like my jacket back I left it in your car.
Every call I receive could be her and I am subjected to continuous self-inflicted disappointment until one day finally, I'm cruising down Ipswitch street during a red sox game and I recieve the call. I'll be in Boston tomorrow night, will you be around. For sure I am, I'll see you then. If ever a workout could make your heart beat this fast, you might only work out once a month to keep fit. Certainly jazzed and redoubled with hope, I sped on to the next day.
I receive a call from her and speed over to her destination, Dartmouth and Newbury, to retrieve my dear over garment. I'm returned it, and we embrace a sweet hug that seemed like futures were imminent, and this time there's no funny business, a rule I've decided well before I set foot to the block. I've got my jacket, she's rid of my jacket, and we depart our moment of supposed last contact forever.
Errant phone calls later before and after she has left and returned from intercontinental travel that never receive a response are the seeming prologue to the brief romance. I wrestle for months over whether I should delete the number forever. It goes, and yet I find the paper that once held her number on a voicemail I checked from a payphone when my cell had died. A call requiring a quarter that I had requested from a victualer who in the misunderstanding of the moment led to, I believe, my being served the worst pulled pork sandwich I have ever eaten. I'll never go back to Rednecks. And I'll never hear from Susan again. All that sticks is someone else's melody with my words, and they have remained as potent as when I first untied the elements.
New Years Day 2007.
I've just celebrated with my girlfriend our one year anniversary. A tumultuous but gratifying relationship, we've made an excellent couple and have established, as couples do, routines and habits for our togetherness. On this day, we've decided that, since I had heard several days prior that Sound Bytes would be open on New Years Day, I lobbied for deliciousness to occur as the first meal of the new year. It's a bit rainy and I've worn my Path train slicker, it's metallic green indicating I'll enter and exit the year with no style. As we wait outside, being cute as is our normal way with eachother, I see Susan exit, her face clear to me as that mysterious could have been that, sadly, has played itself out in my mind before. I'm so shocked that I have to call out.
"Susan!"
"..........Oh my God! ... Hi!"
A hug with hips distant and confused friends about to be amazed or shortchanged at the story to follow. The space around us has turned to the taste of a towel, dry and brittle, crumbling as a barely moist dirtball crumbles at a slight brush of a finger. The hug ends and the space between us fills back up with dust. "What are youy doing here?"
"I'm visiting friends!"
Stupidly, I say, "I'm wearing the same jacket." In my mind it was almost a funny coincidence, but flopped amidst the strangeness of the encounter and the people who had no idea what the significance of that was.
"Yeah.."
Something needed to happen here. I should have introduced my girlfriend, asked for an email, anything, instead I'm left with this bland taste to the end of a story where all I say is, "it was good to see you." In a way it was. There was more closure in that chance encounter than I had gotten out of our fading out. A sadly beautiful moment of awkwardness that I think closed the book on the events between this person and I who know so much about eachother and will always carry peices of the other whether we like it or not, until our memories burnout and fizzle.
Nothing.
I lose it a little bit, and over the next few days I call a couple times and knowing it's slipping further and further, I realize something that I was surprised to realize. My jacket. It's been in her car and I would very much like it back.
A sweet peice of a jacket, I'd bought it off a man in a bar in my hometown for 20 dollars, a delightful metallic green, standing out with reflectors. The gaudy style that I still hold near to my punkish days and was only able to obain after it mattered, the coat that was center to a story all it's own that saw $60 of my dollars donated to a scamming guy with expired insurance who I rear ended and coerced me into a payoff for not wanting to "play games."
The jacket. It's important and I leave a careless message. Hey susan, I'd really like my jacket back I left it in your car.
Every call I receive could be her and I am subjected to continuous self-inflicted disappointment until one day finally, I'm cruising down Ipswitch street during a red sox game and I recieve the call. I'll be in Boston tomorrow night, will you be around. For sure I am, I'll see you then. If ever a workout could make your heart beat this fast, you might only work out once a month to keep fit. Certainly jazzed and redoubled with hope, I sped on to the next day.
I receive a call from her and speed over to her destination, Dartmouth and Newbury, to retrieve my dear over garment. I'm returned it, and we embrace a sweet hug that seemed like futures were imminent, and this time there's no funny business, a rule I've decided well before I set foot to the block. I've got my jacket, she's rid of my jacket, and we depart our moment of supposed last contact forever.
Errant phone calls later before and after she has left and returned from intercontinental travel that never receive a response are the seeming prologue to the brief romance. I wrestle for months over whether I should delete the number forever. It goes, and yet I find the paper that once held her number on a voicemail I checked from a payphone when my cell had died. A call requiring a quarter that I had requested from a victualer who in the misunderstanding of the moment led to, I believe, my being served the worst pulled pork sandwich I have ever eaten. I'll never go back to Rednecks. And I'll never hear from Susan again. All that sticks is someone else's melody with my words, and they have remained as potent as when I first untied the elements.
New Years Day 2007.
I've just celebrated with my girlfriend our one year anniversary. A tumultuous but gratifying relationship, we've made an excellent couple and have established, as couples do, routines and habits for our togetherness. On this day, we've decided that, since I had heard several days prior that Sound Bytes would be open on New Years Day, I lobbied for deliciousness to occur as the first meal of the new year. It's a bit rainy and I've worn my Path train slicker, it's metallic green indicating I'll enter and exit the year with no style. As we wait outside, being cute as is our normal way with eachother, I see Susan exit, her face clear to me as that mysterious could have been that, sadly, has played itself out in my mind before. I'm so shocked that I have to call out.
"Susan!"
"..........Oh my God! ... Hi!"
A hug with hips distant and confused friends about to be amazed or shortchanged at the story to follow. The space around us has turned to the taste of a towel, dry and brittle, crumbling as a barely moist dirtball crumbles at a slight brush of a finger. The hug ends and the space between us fills back up with dust. "What are youy doing here?"
"I'm visiting friends!"
Stupidly, I say, "I'm wearing the same jacket." In my mind it was almost a funny coincidence, but flopped amidst the strangeness of the encounter and the people who had no idea what the significance of that was.
"Yeah.."
Something needed to happen here. I should have introduced my girlfriend, asked for an email, anything, instead I'm left with this bland taste to the end of a story where all I say is, "it was good to see you." In a way it was. There was more closure in that chance encounter than I had gotten out of our fading out. A sadly beautiful moment of awkwardness that I think closed the book on the events between this person and I who know so much about eachother and will always carry peices of the other whether we like it or not, until our memories burnout and fizzle.