amandafaith90
It's almost time for iced tea again. This morning I walked to my car and surprised myself in my own comfort, the air feeling like my skin instead of the cold I've had for months. I like the cold but the warm is welcome when I consider its counterpoint of spring ducklings, irises blooming, and iced tea on the back deck.
If you look up at any given time you can usually see a doorway. Maybe someone going through the main door at work with its glass front and smooth metal bar, or it's your house where you're locked inside, warm and doubting if you should've really stayed home sick.
You can be smoking and writing at the same time, depending on your dedication to either craft. Right now the air feels cloudy and warm, with a dry taste of ash in my mouth as my fingers type. Upholding the tradition of literature, or something. I wonder if there's any more champagne.
There's something simmering in the other room, smells kind of like beer even though she never cooks with that. I'm in my room, next to the books I haven't touched in a few years, thinking about what it would have been like if I didn't major in English. If I got a skill that landed me other than my mom's house on New Year's eve.
A good old fashioned drive in movie, next to the place you used to go camping. Some friends bring cheap Mexican cokes and you open one, showing off how you can flip off the cap with your keys and cutting yourself in the process. Your friends laugh, you suck your thumb and watch the flickering popcorn ad up on the huge screen mounted in front of a sea of mini vans and pickup trucks. You're not even sure what the movie is....a western? Something else? You snuggle into the blankets, taste of copper still in your mouth, and wait to find out.
Banking time with her, for the most part. Listening when she talks, thinking about what we're going to do later while I watch her mouth move. I'm not sure when we met. Maybe at the bank, in line for a bored teller to take a check? Maybe at school, or the bus? Either way it doesn't matter so long as I stay on this park bench, with her, watching her mouth move in pretty curves and thinking about the art gallery we're going to later where I'm going to try and maybe hold her hand in between the busts.
"Let's order a Lyft and get into the city or something, have fun. Sushi maybe and it's been ages since we got our nails done." She looks at me and cocks her head with the same patient enthusiasm on her face that you would see on a Labrador. I snuggle into the sweatpants I've been wearing for 2 days and look at her, perplexed. "Why get your nails done when you don't have anyone who will see them afterwards?" She looks hurt. I sip my coffee and return to Forensic Files. I'm watching the one about a dog who witnessed the murder of her master. It's a good one.
We were thick as thieves, my sister and I. We went to the park and skinned our knees together, made 'real' medicine out of mud and leaves and bark together, ran around in the woods like wild children together. My sister and I, we were together. My sister and I. We aren't together, anymore. We were thick as thieves. The man who hurt her didn't care.
It's funny that the thing I'm thinking most about in the few seconds before this page loaded is that I am going to fuck up the writing for this prompt. There's a group of devotes from my graduating college class who do all the right things for past English majors to do: they go to poetry slams and raise their arms at good lines, there's snapping when something hits home, they are there with well thought out quotes and one liners as long as they need to be. They're still writing. I wish that was still a cult I genuinely belong to.
There aren't many things like being a kid on a hot day when the adults are at work, mid summer vacation, playing with the neighbor girl who you guess is ok but she can be bossy sometimes. You skip around and ride bikes and lay under the trees near the transformer station, next to a weird humming green box that's warm to the touch, and think about whether or not your mom has counted the popsicles in the box or if it's too dangerous to sneak one.
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