When I am twenty-three I dream of a picnic lunch, somewhere on a coast I've never seen, with the waves crashing on a beach I can't see, somewhere close, and weeping willows enclosing us all around. Robbie sits on a branch the height of my chest, looking like a young forest god, crouched and grinning, with leaves in his hair. A dog lopes up, big and ( Read more... )

"It's not a sprint," Robbie's voice calls out from the bedroom, where I just know he's sitting on my bed in a towel, getting everything wet and stupid. And I'll go in there later after making up the loveseat and there the towel will be, getting nasty while I deal with things.

I'll have no underwear to give him, but he won't have showed up with any ( Read more... )

 "So you really had no idea who he was?"

"No, he just kept talking about nothing. Bullshit. I thought it was a nightmare. I mean, it was kind of a nightmare."

Rocky hits the ball, hard, with a seam-ripping thwack. "Not the whole night, Tiger."

I sigh.

"Sorry. I know you don't like talking about..."

"No, it's not that. I just... I don't know what it was ( Read more... )

"But you didn't even COME," I wail, and before he can stop himself Rocky gasps like someone's just stabbed him with a fork.

"I mean..." I have nothing. I'm startled too. Jaime -- Xaime, it would seem -- giggles in the bedroom and emerges, zipping up his stupid jeans:

"What, now?"

"I mean..." Again, nothing.

He looks from me to Rocky, who is ( Read more... )

In the morning he's still there, even scarier-looking with sobriety on his side, milling around my tiny house and making strange bored noises with his lips, alternately quacking and buzzing them like a raspberry, and nearly silently naming every author, I assume, he hasn't heard of, which is all of them. He takes one down off the shelf with a happy ( Read more... )

When I am twenty-three, I would prefer to spend my birthday alone, but Rocky and his mate won't hear of it. I want to drink alone in my apartment, and make art or write stories, but Rocky is convinced that I need to be introduced to a larger circle of friends, namely his. I've seen them and they don't amount to much, but I don't judge him for it: ( Read more... )

When I am twenty-two I am celibate, sober, atheist, straight-edge, non-drinking and non-smoking. One day, trapped in a friendship and unable to find the way out, I've applied a bit of masking tape to my mouth the better to listen more closely to the selfish, self-important words that threaten to come spilling out. My head becomes an echo chamber ( Read more... )

When I am eighteen I find myself in the morning hours with a pocket full of LSD and some tattooed guy's phone number in my hand, wondering at what I've been up to. I'm sitting in a fountain plaza, dead center of the campus, waiting for the sun to come up, watching the trees waving in the lights like creatures underwater, singing softly to myself. ( Read more... )

When I am seventeen, we are newly minted freshmen, too exhausted from childhood to follow through on the plans to recreate ourselves that we drew up all summer, drinking in the heat and feeling at the curious edges and boundaries of our oncoming freedom. The fever passed before the summer, and we find ourselves abject and terrified in the face of ( Read more... )

CHAPTER TWO: COMPLINE

When I am young, there are only two kinds of dreams: Parties, and lovers. Knowing little of either, they are stitched together by the evidence of television, memories, fantasies, fantasies born out of memories and memories born of fantasy. The party dreams take many forms, but always the disgruntling, gerundial undulations of ( Read more... )