| |
Even Hollowed
By
Jenny Humphrey
They are walking in the Haight. They are looking for a place to sit down and eat. He is wearing a clean white shirt, designer jeans and dark sunglasses, from which her twin reflections shine. She is reading the messages scrawled over the streets. LOVE ME UNTIL THE DAY I DIE, she sees in the sidewalk, and EVERY TIME I DIE I AM BORN AGAIN in graffiti on the brick storefront of a head shop. "I need to know what we are," she had written in the email. Yet now she is with him, and she has nothing to say. Instead she reads the signs around her, the clutter of messages left behind.
She met a boy once who was living in the park, and who muttered green buds as she passed. She sat down and he smoked a bowl with her. What kept her there beside him was the way that he held her gaze in a calm and certain attitude. She liked how he looked at her, and she told him so. "Some people," he said, "just need to be seen."
"I'm so ripped," he says and she answers, "me, too. I was out until four. Are those new jeans?"
"I got them yesterday. Here in the Haight."
"Villain's?"
"Yeah."
"Have you been to Café Gratitude?"
"No, is it good?"
"It's a raw vegan café. All their dishes are affirmations. Like if you order the I Am Abundant, they bring you the dish and say you are abundant. "
"I want to sit outside somewhere," he says and she notices the tattoo. It is on the soft skin above the wrist. "What's that?" she asks and touches his arm.
"It's the sign for Leo."
"I take it you're a Leo?"
"Yeah."
"I met a man at the party last night who goes by Leo, and he actually is one."
"Where was the party?"
"Jonathan's."
"Who's Jonathan?"
"He's a drum and bass DJ and acts like one. He's all wound up and stuff. Like it will take him twenty minutes to tell you he went for a cup of coffee this morning. And he's got this crazy Mohawk thing."
I WILL ALWAYS WANT MORE, says the sidewalk in cotton candy purple letters. She takes off her jacket. The sun bleaches everything and everything is white, wind rustling, bare arms of tank-top clad students in this part of the Haight not quite so overrun by vagrants. They pass a street sale of skimpy rayon dresses, fake gold hoops and paperback romances. He looks like a fresh clean thing just out of the dryer with that collar shirt, a shirt that would fit her and that hangs on him like a limp white flag. Her cell phone rings. She takes it out and sees that it is her boyfriend. She puts it back in her purse. He whistles the melody of a song by Secret Machine, "Lonely, Jealous and Stoned."
"How was the show last night?" she asks.
"It was great. I took some ex."
"How was it?"
"I was too drunk to tell."
"That's too bad."
A man holds out a frying pan with two one-dollar bills. "Help me out, he says. "I'm saving up for an accordion." She notices a missing person flyer. It is orange. Her name is Melissa Herring. She is smiling but her expression is vacant, even hollowed. She wants to ask him to take off his shades. Instead she says, "Let's catch the N. We can get to Gratitude that way."
They wait at the stop and there is silence between them though the crowd of pedestrians chatters around them. YOU WILL MELT ME AWAY, she sees razored onto a newspaper bin.
You know these days. These days of impossible warmth. She imagines that if she herself had a piece of chalk or a blade, she would imprint her own message to be seen as she sometimes needs to be seen, though not the way she sees herself reflected in his shades. I WANT TO BE WITH YOU ALL THE TIME, she would write.
Copyright © 2006 Jenny Humphrey
|
