It's a foreboding way to start the new year. In the back of my car with a girl that fucked me in the port-potty straight on through the end of the show and everybody leaving. We'd come out and everybody'd been gone. Even through the insane MDMA high, cold dread crept through my fingertips at the sight of the empty warehouse and the grip of that girl's hand in mine, and my lips whispered, "Fuck."
Someone had taken my three hundred dollar Kenneth Cole peacoat too, but that was the least of my bothers at the time. I chalked it up to the ticket price that I hadn't paid, it was gone, and there were a number of other left-behind jackets lying around so I just picked through them until I picked up one that felt right, and i ended up with a black sleeping bag of a trench coat thing. A puffy cape pretty much, and I immediately fell in love with it. It wasn't hard, to fall in love with that thing. It was economical, and cozy, and warm and comforting, and my heart was flooding at that moment, and the girl latched onto my arm, saying words to me that I didn't hear ("hey, what should we do now? let's go somewhere, take me somewhere, somewhere for just you and me"), wasn't near enough worthy of what the dam of my emotions was holding back. I gave it all to the coat. She just tagged along. Something absolutely horrible had happened somewhere in the last two hours, when I was dancing high and blind in the middle of the thick crowd by the stage that night. Both our phones were dead.
I slept in that coat that night, on the flat back of my old trusty Sport parked up a hill four blocks away. I put the back seats down and opened the jacket up, and we both slept on it, that random girl and me, because my phone was dead, and hers was too, and it was late, after 2:00, after 3:00 even. All alone with everything closed on New Year's, no where to go except my car, which was a long walk from the pier as the drugs were wearing off. With this girl. She wanted to play still, in my car, she put her legs behind her head, "See? Come on, take it."
But I told her I was too high and rolled to face the beige plastic and curled into a ball and cried under the guise of deep drug breathing and withdrawal shivers. I'd lost it. I'd lost her. Last night in the blind white of haze of the high and the lights, I'd lost sight of what I really wanted. The who and the why had escaped me for just a few hours.
Life's funny like that though. I'd been hooked. Enamored again by someone I knew I should not be in love with, what a horrible idea, but it always looks so good at the time, feels so right and universal, like it's meant to be, before anything real happens and everything is a possibility still. It looks so good then, blonde hair, blue-eyed by my side. It could happen. It could've, I should say. Not after this. The whole stars aligning to bring us together bullshit, if that's actually a thing stars do in collusion amongst themselves up there, if that's true and real, then that alignment for us was that night, last night, with me and Callie, and in those few hours I'd missed it. Our courses had crossed but didn't change, headings same, but away now, away from each other off to the mountains with my thoughts. That course was a dark one. In winter.
Spiraling out.
