Absconding.
Scenery: some flashing by, that further, creeping, a stray tree trunk interloping, passing our field of vision at yet a middle rate of speed, common enough, but disorienting to the inebriate. Einstein himself gave the analogy of the moving train, and the telegraph poles and the hills. And then Freud picked up the narrative and said the utility poles, well, were not just utility poles.
The whole day, dissipation, the open promise of perched lips in a puffer fish pose, coming closer and closer. The old clothing smell of Aunt Brenda, and the gregarious crimson of her chosen lip shade. It would look like I had squished a spider on my collar, I wotted.
Up before the chickens. No devilment beyond the usual, listening to the thin crackle of my body dying second after second. How many days otherwise had we sat derelict, like abandoned Chryslers near the tree line? Shit. How many days?
Crimbus was coming, and the yuletide and Auld Syne didn't broach us without our prior consent, such that the day meant nothing, even as we passed the presents, unless we truly cared. All the plays, programs and Hallmark movies said as much.
It was yet a season.
They had asked me, circa October 1996 or so, what I thought of my own future, and it was blank as the old chalkboards, a kind of indefinite passing of time, her hand on my knee as I scarfed a chicken wrap--but nevertheless, what nerve to ask a teenager about his or her own future, with me sitting no hope of much and so forth, you know, and put to the question, put to task, verily, by and by, to give a quick look into the fog of the future.
Some 27 years later, I can still smell the fry grease of that tall girl. The movie critic. The gay. The closeted gay. The motorcycle hippie. The man on the edge of the football team, that nice suburb called academic probation.
"Where do you see yourself in the future?"
Ask that girl that I just kicked-out of my car.
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