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Part 6

I know I said that I was leaving…but

-Sinatra

Do you ever wish that when you were younger you would’ve done things different? Done different things? Broken out of your shell and taken risks? If I could go back and be 17 again I would probably take fewer risks that before I couldn’t wait to take. I thought I couldn’t wait to take them. The years shove past quickly, running over each other. So many stories to tell, so few stories worth telling. Life isn't a silver platter and we aren't special. I feel like I have to make up for the time I spent being myself. I feel like I haven't seen enough of the world when I feel old, and then when I realize that I’m still young I know that I’ve seen more than a lot of other kids my age.

There is no story that we have that everyone wants to hear. There are long distances between people and love is genuine hard thing to find. Hard to sustain. Leaning towers of sand that yearn for collapse. Life is staying up late to keep in touch with friends. Life is those moments when we find each other. Getting up early, brushing your teeth, shaving ripened unwonted hairs and putting on matching clean clothes. Being presentable. If there was a way to narrate redemption contrary to this I would write it but it always comes across unsettling. Untrue. There are no pilgrims-of-one in the Happily Ever After. Perhaps redemption is the story. Our cultural mythos, brought to you by DisneyViacomAOLTimeWarner tells us that compassion trumps intellect in the end, but of course there is no end. So far as I know, there are no active writers from beyond the grave, not really anyway. Max Brooks may come the closest. When we die, we die.

“You're just bitter,” she said shaking her head.

“Bitter is good.” I lay on her bed trying to coax myself away from her laptop on which I have been subjecting her to Randy Newman videos like I Want You to Hurt Like I Do. Youtube replaces all-request radio. Absence replaces presence. Tonight is the night she is leaving.

Leaving!? Leaving?!? Leaving you ask?

Yes. Hanging over the story of our entire summer was the knowledge that after her month in Utah with her family she would be returning for a week and then going back to school in Texas. I stayed for a few days and returned to prep the story. Now I was bitter, apparently.

“Are we going to the show or not?” she asked.
“Sure. Yes. I don't care. We go, we don't go. The show goes on.”

“I thought you wanted to go.”

“I DO want to go! But I want to write something today. I don't want today to have been a waste.” Pause. “Not that spending time with you tonight is a waste.”

“Bitter.”

“What if I died tonight? On the way
to the concert? So what if my loved ones will want to feel loved and special when I'm gone. I want to create something brilliant. Create a character that looks and sounds and feels real and put enough semblances of myself in him so he’ll last forever.”

“Yes, yes. You could call him Ozymandias. We could call him Dr. Huck Finn, and after he goes to school and gets his doctorate he could intern with House.”

“Something that hasn't been done before!”

“All your other selves are only you. It's almost 8 o'clock.”

“GAH!”

“I love you.”

“I …love! I can love! Are you implying I don’t love!? I love people the way that I want to be loved; I
leave them alone so they can write. Do unto others, right? That's Jesus! Jesus said that.”

“Jesus was a Capricorn. Come on! I'm all dressed up. Put your clothes on.”

I got up and kissed her. “What’s the name of the town where you’ll be?”

“College Station.”

“What’s the name of the town?”

“I’ll be in College Station.”

“The name of the town is— ”

“Yes.”

“Can I come visit?”

She scrunched her face distractedly. “I expect I’ll be busy. It is school, not vacation. Some of us actually work. At it.”

Ignoring the jab. “I’ve been thinking about going to a writers’ seminar this fall,” I said.

“That’s nice.”

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Sure you can come visit. Get your clothes on. We’ll be late.” I closed the laptop and conversation stopped.

The show was a
long-haired band playing a venue packed with hipsters whom she strode in
amongst, confidently and began dancing with abandon. Her arms in the air. My instinct was to plaster myself to the
wall. But plastering myself to the wall
was exactly the kind of thing that I’d been doing wrong since I was 15 years
old. Why not yield to abandon? Why not
give in to openness? Why not connect?

Why not unmask, man?

I snaked my way in
amongst the stinky undulations: the bearded boys in flannel and Converse sneakers,
the miniskirt girls in work boots. She
had garnered a following, two guys denoting their territory with gyrated hips
and flailing arms in her general direction.
She danced oblivious. I had to work my way in. Bumping into the guy at her back like it was a
free form accident. Not shying away,
which caused him to angry eye me. Scowl
and pivot, ass for an ass, the other guy soon got the hint.

I was dancing with
my girl, and she was dancing with the music.
The music thrashed and roared until our ears were ringing and our eyes were
tearing and our throats were soar from screaming and our hands were red from
clapping and she jumped and cheered and I put my hands around her waist and I
was happy.

I drove her home in the moonless dark. Listening to a pop song on the radio about Romance I heard the soft and potent breathing of sleep from the passenger seat, little snores from a girl curling into herself. I turned down the volume on the stereo until there was only the sound of her and the purr of the road. A bluish glow illumining us both. How often I think that moments like that are great metaphors for life. The road in
the darkness, leading back home.

“Tell me story,” she said without moving.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I am asleep. Tell me a story.” She stretched her legs and redoubled them under her like a cat winding into a ball.

“You know— about that writers’ seminar this fall—”

“Waste of time.”

“It’s outside Austin. That’s close right? It’s also a meditation clinic. I think it
sounds perfect. October in Texas.”

“Austin’s two hours away. You don’t need a seminar. Or a clinic.”

“I know, but I’ve been thinking about all those stories I read at school. All those fresh sparkleface incomings trying to invent new ways to tell a story, and some of them even succeeding but
even the best of them the same old story. A high school relationship gone sour, or going sour, or worst of all: prevented from going sour.”

“Please.”....

“Its so cliché you know? Like writing about dreams. That drives me crazy! I don’t want to write about… dreams. Or love. Or change. I want a story that everyone wants to hear.”

“Don’t care.”

“No I— Okay.”

“A story.”

“A story.”

We were the third car to stop. I think it was a
Saturday but it might have been a Tuesday. The darkness was all around us. Jack
pulled over to take a look, “Maybe we can help,” she said, but I quickly saw
that we could not.

“It was an accident,” a man said.

“I bet they were drinking,” another man said. Of
course they were. What else was there to do but drink? The landscape was
desolate at best. Both vehicles were mangled, one half inside the twisted
other, upside down.

“He was going the wrong way,” another man said, my
legs were shaking because I had to pee.

Jack surveyed the scene, “see,” he said pointing,
“it was inevitable” and we crouched and sniffed.

There was nothing could be done. Police arrived
lights flashing. I snuck off to take a piss in the embankment. In the grass I
saw what appeared to be a hand reaching out and pointing limply. The moon was
dull. I stumbled back, feeling better, empty.

“Poor bastards,” she said and we all nodded, some
of us without nodding at all except with our eyes.

“I love you,” I said.

She was already asleep. I carried her inside and Dennis Rodman came up groggily to sniff at my pantleg. I set her in bed, tucked her in and drove home alone, not a little bit disappointed.

In the morning she would be gone. Alone, again I sat down to write the story of our summer together and realized that nothing really had happened. Time passes differently for different people. I was asleep. I woke up. The door opened. My grandfather returned from his summer hiking. He brought in the mail and left. I was alone. I got a letter from my college friend Tim, his father was dying. A month later, his father was dead. I was going to Texas.