My mother dropped me off at the convenience store, turned rust-brown in the dark illumination of the afternoon setting sun. She parked her outdated sedan - luxurious, had she bought it new two decades ago - across the empty four lane highway, under the blackening cover of the curtained-out record shop, cloaked in its own put-ons of heavy velvet theatre curtains and nightcolor paint. Roving along the streets away, we walked sidewalks along a flat one-story desert, skateboard wheels grinding dust, brown to red to orange to brown…
The city to the ocean was a bombed out husk. Skeletons of five and ten stories rose like trees, their hollow spaces letting light pass through in spooky shafts of sunlight cut up narrower and narrower until they reached the street. My mother had gone back as we explored it. The sun had turned the ocean orange, a dead sea of rusted ship carcasses. We desperately wish for blue, for sailing. There’s no tradewinds anymore, and no one has the gold for a sextant. My mother’s back up North, where the green has been forcibly planted into dying soil all around the monastic silence of the university.
My boyfriend turns to me. “Hey now, let’s- you know, upon the- I never considered that maybe- atop the- walking over there we can- talk about it to me- I just want to know- I need to work it out- don’t you agree that- if only we had time-“ and on and on, searching in beetle-like circles behind me as we walk through the empty streets. We stay on the sidewalk out of superstition more than genuine caution, cars rare and oftentimes ours. He has trinkets in his hands, overflowing his pockets and bags. Small pieces of plastic he paws and drips himself upon, scared and feverish in his info-gathering.
We speak to each other in chains of referrals. Did you know, will you listen, pass along, into each other’s hands. They give me the info and I take it home, I hand off my own recommendations. It’s rare that we consume anything, the ritual of swapping more than enough to satiate the true purpose of the meetings. We’ve become obsessives in our own right, like my boyfriend, though few of us make the mistake he does of assuming the collections to be sovereign beyond the mere act of collecting and comparing.
I lost my virginity high on LSD in the central asian decor of an eighth floor apartment. Amidst heavy Persian and Mongolian imports, tapestries and artifacts wreathed in heavy smoke and chemicals soaked into paper LSD tabs, a connection was sparked, sacred beyond what can be found in the dead world anymore. I floated above the room, in bliss this time and not from the detachment of the previous experience. Something played on the television and a cassette tape went around the wheels on a device above it. We were all sniffing glue from a paper bag and the experience was amplified twice over.
Night always falls as a grand staging for the moon. It’s the only thing we can see now, vaguely reddish, hung above a black skin, floating limp and low, always full like a second sun, larger than it has any right to be. It loves the water, hovering, just like that. Back at the university we drink sake and meditate on our insanity in the japanese gardens. On the coast, we see it straight ahead and words come to us, disordered as a flood we’ll sort over in sun-baked contemplation beneath the humidity of an eternal August, the last dreamy week before school begins, that one final Saturday that never seems to end…
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