Film

There is a bird on a wire across the street, a tiny ink blot with fluttering wings and a triangular tail that lifts up and down every once in a while. It’s a fidgety thing, poking itself under its black feathers with that pointy beak. High above, the gray sky is a peaceful dome of smooth dim shade. Lighting a cigarette, I let the faded light of evening wash across my pale disinterested face. I’m so tired I can taste the ache in the dryness of the smoke curled against the back of my throat, stale, burned, a hotness which ignites my chest, my exhausted bones sheltered in place. In my mind I crawl like a cat, slink up the walls of the cage which is home and look down at myself as I suck a deep drag. Out the window images move in front of my yellow eyes, lush green lawns and the silly people tending to them, driveways of cars they do not drive. A young mother in pajamas in the middle of the afternoon pushes a stroller around the block for the forty seventh time but who’s counting. We are in motion, we are detached. Bedroom slippers. Laptops. Hair ties. I remember the cold beer you drank as we sat at the outside bar and watched the city lights electrify the night. How the water droplets formed on the outside of the glass and slid underneath your thick fingers. Your cool hands on my bare skin in the heat of summer. Bodies melting into each other all around us, wine and whiskey and lipstick and the sounds of some indie rock band at the back of the place near the bathrooms, wooden walls and rum stained floors. The vintage vending machine which dispensed soft packs of cigarettes for twelve dollars each, you had to pull the long pole handle toward you to get the pack to slip out of the silver slot. I am thirteen, I am twenty two, I am thirty five. The women’s room was covered in raunchy articles and racy old fashioned photos, one featured a man from what had to be the 1930’s in a three piece tweed suit and top hat, blindfolded, two scantily clad young women leading him by each of his outstretched hands. Underneath the title read: Against His Will. Summer smolders in the pit of my stomach, the smell of a humid bar and a honeysuckled breeze. It is any given day and night of a season which has bled into all the others, in a time and place I cannot remember and hope I never forget. We ignore the signs and hope for the best. I pour the first drink of the night as your body encircles me from behind. Love is beautiful, numb, and blind. The little bird on the wire sings a crinkly twilight song, cocks his hollow quarter-sized head and flies off toward someplace, suddenly, without hesitation. Just like that, leaving this one far behind.