Does it mean anything that I don’t mind dropping friends? That I don’t mind if I ever hear from certain peoples? We owe each other nothings. The safest exits are among those who owe each other nothings. Familiar strangers.
I think it started when people in my life started dying. In truth, they’ve always been dying. Mostly word of these incidents came from far afield, regarding people I likely would never have connected with again. On that account, though, I maintain a kind of romance imagining that being friends once means friends forever, and there will be a reckoning at which we will be together.
That kind of bromance shit would never happen. It might happen if I was OJ Simpson, at the brink of suicide, wishing well to and ticking off names of people who I knew only in passing, or not at all, but who somewhere filled my head with something. That something may have been smegma, or snot, or joy. But if it was something I would be sure to memorialize them in my last moments of privilege.
People get sick of my shit, and it goes all which ways.
…
There is a woman here I can not help myself from looking at. My eyes get weak, the muscles sag, as the orbs softly swim toward hers. She has noticed. She smirks a bit, I think, or maybe it’s a chagrin from knowing nothing could ever happen between us. She looks locked in her culture, locked in Lebanon or Egypt or wherever the hell her roots are planted. I know the hazards, and the inevitable waste of time it would be, but I think about it anyway. We can still think, right?
No words yet but looks aplenty. Not unlike Wednesday, when the one woman who I felt certain was my destiny, if only for a couple of weeks or nights, those kind of lingering looks toward me, with the added bonus that she actually spoke more than two words to me. She seemed, to use a coy word, adorable, like onw who appears only at the moment of your death, a gentle, taunting rebuke at all you did wrong in repelling lovers.
…
We seem to have dodged another bullet down in FL. Some power surges but no real damage from the megastorm.
Comment boards are such a drain at these times. People think they are so smart in suggesting that no one should live in a hurricane zone. No one. What a genius suggestion. None should live in tornado zones, earthquake, typhoon, tsunami, volcano… All these regions should be permanently deserted.
And as is common, ignorance is considered a bragging right, or a talking point. “I never heard of Fort Myers until now but it looks like a place where…” “I don’t know anything about hurricanes but…” Was debate always littered with that measly-seeming crutch?
…
There is another woman here whose masklessness is a continuous revelation to me. I never would have thought her to be so chubby-cheeked and Jaba-the-hut-like in the mouth. I imagined thick, beautiful lips and a decisive, vindictive smile that she used as a weapon. In fact her smile is genuine and unremarkable.
Long story short she looked better with a mask. I think I did, too.
