A week ago, (give or take) I found myself on Route 60 bound towards a destination eight-hundred and thirty-six miles from home to see about a girl, because love does that to you. And while driving till my eyes were dry and heavy, and while I ate at ramshackle diners where folks there don’t respond to new blood in kind, while I slept in the back seat of my car – dreaming, I couldn’t help but think that maybe it’s true. I might be the world’s biggest fool.
She let me read her diary. She showed me pictures of her and her friends. She wrote letters signed ‘With Love’. I couldn’t get enough of her. She was all I had, and she was all I needed. George, Steve, and I never saw eye to eye after what had happened. We spoke on the phone almost every day, though; they didn’t want to be blamed for losing touch, and neither did I. We always spoke of getting together, just us three, like old times. I’ve found that you can lie to yourself as many times, and in as many ways as you can think of, as long as you can believe that it’s for your own good. A schism was created when she came into my life; thing is, is that George and Steve tried to jump. The big H was what they landed on.
Steve left first, drunk and too strung out to roll on his side that he choked on his own vomit. I’d seen George at the funeral, as he read his brother’s eulogy, and when he told me to ‘live’ afterwards. He was found two weeks later in his closet, with a noose secured tightly around a steel pipe from a hole in the ceiling he had made. There was no note left for anyone to find, just a plush toy bear seated adjacent to the closet, almost watching.
She often spoke of death when the two of us would lie together in her bed early in the morning. The window would be ajar from when I had come through earlier that night, and the sounds of birds chirping before the morning’s first light would be the only other sound besides her quiet voice. I kept her head lain down on my bare chest and would listen, eyes half-closed as I stared over at the window. She asked me what went wrong between us, and at the time I let the question linger through my head without a sound escaping my mouth. I had nothing to say, but for what it’s worth I did love her, it just wasn’t my move at the time.
She told me how sorry she was, how her life is a total mess which is why she left me in the first place and how along the way to somewhere she must have forgotten how to love and how we’re not meant to be together because it’s in her character to constantly break my heart and how I would always forgive her because maybe I’ve had too much of love to drink to notice the tear in my heart beginning to spill...
A two-bit radio once played a song about a girl with a thing for dark eyes, long nights, and guys that never seem to fit in.
I guess that's it.
I wonder if I should post the songs and poems I wrote a long time ago...
