Field Trip

Working on a lot of projects, so my pieces are slow-coming, but please take a gander at my piece on The Flip this week.  Click through below.

AZZ EVERYWHERE!  AZZ!  AZZ!  EVERYWHERE!

In front of us, on a stage flanked by dusty marigold curtains, a sweaty black man with relaxed hair and a red flannel shirt raps in front of a beautiful tableau: girls with their backs to the crowd, shaking, bumping, gyrating their asses to his oversimplified but altogether catchy song “Azz Everywhere.”

For the better part of ten minutes, the man known as Big Freedia continues to loop the same lyrics over and over again – AZZ EVERYWHERE! AZZ!  AZZ!  EVERYWHERE! –  the girls sweating and shaking and humping and lip-biting with an intensity that would make the casual, sober observer decide that they are hired hands and not just girls relieved to find out where the azz is (everywhere).  The crowd stands beneath Big Freedia, all of us willfully subjecting ourselves to the gratuitous ass shaking.  It’s like a circus of ass with Big Freedia as (azz?) the ringmaster…

Crack Attack

The subway doors open.  My headphones are on as I cross the threshold.  Over my internet-procured, Pitchfork Best New Tracks-researched, I’m-so-indie bullshit I hear “OH MY GOD!  THIS IS THE WOMAN I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR ALL MY LIFE, MAN!  ALL MY LIFE!”

I keep my eyes down. I walk towards the other side of the train.  I hope and pray that this loud man, whose face I have not ventured to seek out, is not talking about me.  Dear God, I think, please let these words be intended for someone else.

“MAN!  MAN!  YOU SEE HER?  ISN’T SHE BEAUTIFUL?  HEY!  YOU!  LADY!  YOU’RE BEAUTIFUUUUUUUULLLLL!”

I notice that the lisped sound of this man’s excessively booming voice is pointing in my direction, and when I look up across from me, I am confronted with the humored stares of three boys, all looking at me, the victim of this embarrassing crime of flattery delivered by a lunatic.  Fucking hell.

I look back down at my iPod, turning the volume all the way down so I can hear everything being yelled at me.  A pair of sneakers appears in front of me.  I look up.

He holds onto a silver bar with aging hands and leans towards me with a maniacal friendliness.  “You so pretty,” he says, his voice lowered slightly, sweet as crazy candy laced with arsenic.  I squeak out a “Thank you” and place my gaze firmly back into my lap.  His charm turns towards the girl next to me, a young blonde in dark blue jeans.  “You so pretty, too.  I can’t choose!  Can I have both of you?”  She says something and he walks away.

After he has tired of wooing the ladies, his comments turn towards the men on the train.  “Don’t look at me like that, man,” he yells at a boy sitting across from me.  “People gonna think I like guys.  You fuckin ugly, man.  Ugly.”

The volume of his voice gains footing again, desiring to make its way down the train towards a man standing by the door.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT GUY WEARING, MAN?!  LOOK AT THE COLOR COMBINATIONS!  JESUS CHRIST.  YOU UGLY MAN.  UGLY!  ANYONE GOT ROACH SPRAY?”

Crazy Pants snaps one of his arms back, bent like a pantomime snake about to attack, or, you know, someone spraying a giant human cockroach with a giant can of fake insecticide.

“SSSSSSSSS!!! SSSSSSSS!!!”  His mouth makes the hissing noise of an aerosol can releasing poison.  He dances down the aisle; his toes tapping on the linoleum floor that is his stage.

“You ever see a guy uglier than that?!” he yells, standing in a state of rest.  No one offers their personal opinion.  On the other side of the subway, someone stifles a laugh.  “Can’t dress for shit!” he continues.

The subway stops, letting out a number of confused and horrified travelers.  The man catches someone before he leaves.  “MAN!  YOUR HEAD SO BIG!  WHEN’S IT GONNA STOP GROWING?  YOU NEED A HELMET FOR THAT SHIT!  YOUR HEAD SO BIG!”  He looks down at the Human Cockroach he assaulted a few minutes previous.  “Pap, you’re not the ugliest man no more,” he assures him.  The doors close.

Our tin can subway rattles down the tracks.  Crazy Pants anticipates the end of our journey together.  “You guys have been great,” he says with wistful sentiment, as though we were an audience who paid good money to sit center stage at the insane asylum.  His acerbic tone returns, however, and he wraps up his monologue with “The ugly ones, you’re still ugly, though.”

The doors open.  My stop.  I shuffle towards the door, hoping he doesn’t follow me and his other favorite blonde onto the platform.

“CRACK ATTACK!  CRACK ATTACK!  CRACK ATTACK!” he yells, pin pointing with great accuracy the theme of the last five minutes.

Field Trip

Check out my piece on The Flip today.  Click through on the image below.

These near-summer nights are like heaven to me.  A warm blanket for my frozen hands.  A good book for my silly brain.  Each week I shed a new layer, finding more of myself beneath.  Oh, this is what it’s like.  This is what it’s like to be sane. I’m starting to remember.

I take pictures of a flowering tree at 10 p.m., its colors bleached out with my weak flash, red turning pink.  The park is washed in color, even at night.  It screams to be seen.  Chartreuse foliage lines the boughs of trees that place themselves against hazy clouds soaking up city lights from below.  What should be smoky gray is rendered a smoggy blush.  I lift my hand to a branch.  I touch the leaves and feel their newness…

Waking Limbs

“Come over and watch me pack,” she said.  Jo was leaving for Poland the next day.  It was 10:30 at night and I was feeling bored and boring.  “Come over,” she repeated.  And so I did.

I rode my bike along the water, Manhattan passing on my right.  Every single stupid, pent-up thought I had over the last three hours, sitting in the darkened quiet of my apartment, disappeared like plumes of smoke into ether.  What was once thick and gray and dense disintegrated into nothing.  It would come back, surely, but I felt distanced from myself for the moment.

The streets were empty, save for the occasional car, and the breeze was cold but not biting.  I tucked my scarf into my jacket, in and around my neck.  I listened to my thin rubber tires against the road.  I pumped the brakes with my hands around corners.  And into ten minutes, I was there.

Her hair was fresh and clean and brushed in her distinctive way – bleached blonde hair tousled at the top, voluminous and unique.  She pulled shorts and tops out of a closet and placed them into a bag.  My smoky brain had come back.  I lay on her white bed, groaning about a variety of self-obsessed calamities.  I thought about getting a real job with responsibilities and schedules and a ladder that I could at least pretend went somewhere.  Modeling was a slide that started at the top and only led you down if you didn’t get off it quickly enough.

You’re going through this stage to get to another, she told me.  It’s like you’ve been lying on one side of your body and it’s gone numb.  She said that, too.  You have to move over to the other side to balance it out.

My friends were filled with good advice.  It was just about whether I chose to listen.  The other week, when I was scraping a bottom I had become familiar with over the last few months, my friend told me that the depths of your lows match the reaches of your highs.  What we saw as a manic pendulum, was actually indicative of our emotional reach, the level of emotion we were capable of.  Those who felt the lowest lows were the only ones who could feel the highest highs.  It was a bit sick, really.  The fact that I could feel so horrifically, awfully, irredeemably sad was a good thing.  It meant I was capable of great feeling, for better or worse.

I was waiting for the better.

Jo continued to pack.  Denim shorts.  Cream tops.  Tie-dyed parachute pants and a donut sweatshirt for the plane ride there.  She showed me presentations she had given at work that week, singular words written over and over and over again on big, stiff pieces of white paper and then turned into something polished on her computer screen.  She had conference calls with people in Europe.  People weighed in on her work.  She made changes and then responded with the alterations.  It made me realize how quickly we turn into adults by default, how you become good at something, how people eventually pay you for your talents and abilities.  Years ago I hadn’t realized the importance of this – the self-worth that is derived from work.  All I ever had to do was show up and look good.

The previous week I had done an interview about modeling.  I talked animatedly and with weighty opinion on the industry and my thoughts on it.  I was candid and honest and likely sounded a bit ungrateful to someone who didn’t know the business.  Afterward, I felt overexposed, by no one’s fault but my own.  I emailed the editor, asking if I could read the piece before he ran it.

I could tell plenty of sob stories about nerve wracking self-esteem issues, but at the end of the day, as intense as it has been on my emotional well-being, the industry has been better to me than most.  Because of modeling, I have been afforded the ability to travel on a whim, pay for my life, meet interesting people and any other host of wonderful things.  Most importantly, it exposed me to the possibility of an unconventional world.  Life didn’t need to be so black and white.  There was beauty in struggle.  Struggle was the gray area.  Seeing the world as I have, living the way that I have been able to, was proof that I could build my life in any fashion I wished.  And though this new paradigm filled me with a massive anxiety, it came with it a freedom of mind many of my peers did not possess themselves.

Still, I was waiting for the next move, the next thing.  I was waiting for the tingling numbness to go away.  I was waiting to move on.

Little Thoughts for Regular Days

The park was wet and empty.  The people had gone away again, though at least not on account of snow.  Drops filled dips in pavement one by one until they had created something meaningful, something of substance.  Plastic bags, torn and shredded, clung to the budding boughs of trees, now lined with the suggestion of a color.  Purple.  Vermillion.  Crimson red.  A pot full of yellow daffodils sat on top of a strip of unnaturally green Astroturf, immune to the benefits of rain.

Below ground, the world was still gray, living in perpetual monochrome.  Filthy, soot-soaked tiles lined the coved ceilings.  Someone sang a song at the end of the platform, their voice carrying the length of the space.  I looked up and down the platform at the bodies in motion, people positioning themselves for a place on an arriving train.  How much of each other we didn’t know, would never know.  The people, like countries, with their own histories and wars, their boundaries and rules of governance.  Millions of little countries.  The pieces of people.

Life on a Bike

I bought my bike off of a boy named Peter who lived on a park filled with flowering trees.  It was a red Motobacane.  Made in France.  He brought bikes back from Connecticut and fixed them up in his apartment.  It had curved handlebars that made me think I was going to fly forward and knock my front teeth out on uneven pavement.  My boots clung shakily to the old silver pedals made out of dulled aluminum.  It felt strange riding again; I hadn’t been on a bike since a year previous, when I was still living in West Hollywood and would only ever ride the half a mile to see movies at The Grove.

Not wanting to take advantage of Peter’s time, I rode the bike down the sidewalk just twenty feet before turning around.  It wasn’t comfortable.  My legs bent too close to my body and my back hunched forward like a cat.  It took Peter offering two times to raise the seat for me to accept.  I did stupid things like this often – not changing things that would be the obvious solutions to my problems.  “It’s okay,” I would say, shaking off someone’s invitation to help me, even if it meant I did things like not buy a bike that was perfectly fine for me and wasting an afternoon walking thirty minutes from North Brooklyn to South Brooklyn and then thirty minutes back, empty handed and frustrated.

He took my purse and told me to ride around the park, get a feel for the bike.  Changing the seat had made all the difference; my legs rotated in circular motions, the left knee rising as the right knee fell, over and over again.  I rode through the park’s center, little kids skateboarding and riding scooters, unwatched, their parents likely enjoying some time to themselves.

It was cloudy and the air felt damp against my skin.  It had been so long since I had thought about nothing.  My normal thought process – frantic and planning and searching and panicked – had slowed down to a tolerable roar.  Left.  Right.  Left.  Right.  Steady.  Left.  Right.  Steady.  I thought only of not falling over.  Bliss.

I came back to where he was, standing at his place against an over-painted wrought iron gate.  “I’ll take it,” I told him, and then I handed him a bunch of twenty-dollar bills that I counted out between my right and left hand, the sound of paper against paper indicating our transaction.

“One two three four five.  One two three four five.  One two three four five.”

I thanked him and rode down Driggs on my very own bike.  It felt strange to be in New York and own an item that was a further extension of myself.  Vainly, I wondered what I looked like riding it down the street.  “There’s that girl on the red bike,” someone might say, and they might see my blonde hair and my focused stare and think that the bike said something about my personality, which it didn’t.  There was something liberating I knowing that I had purchased something not wholly because I thought it looked cool or was in my taste, but that it would get me from A to B, that it was light, and that its 57 cm measurements accommodated my long legs.

Later, I met my friends on Grand Avenue.  We were riding over the bridge to watch the friend of a friend play in some beer-soaked bar on Houston.  I was indescribably nervous.  The bike and I were still new to each other and for whatever reason I didn’t trust it.  I kept thinking – even though I had learned how to ride a bike over twenty years ago – that a tire would come loose and I would pitch forward.  I imagined myself falling over on pavement.  I thought about what bones would likely break first – if it would be my arm or my collarbone or possibly a hip.  “Get a helmet,” my mom told me.  I thought about that, too.

I watched my friends barrel down the sloped portion of the bridge, gladly picking up speed.  I was jealous of their freedom.  I pumped the brakes and kept my pace measured.  Somewhere towards the end of the bridge, I began to realize I had trust issues in general.  With people.  With things.  It would take me awhile to get used to this again.

At the bar, my friends drank shots of tequila and drank bottles of beer.  A jazz band played horrifically in the corner, obliterating my ability to hear and think clearly.  Outside, the sun went down and the clouds moved in, threatening to bring in another day of rain.  And in an hour, we left, going back up and over the bridge.  A giant, yellowed full moon hung low above the bridge.  Lightning snapped in the distance, beyond Manhattan, beyond Brooklyn.  We rode next to moving subways filled with blue seats and stationary passengers.  Cuh-clack!  Cuh-clack!  Cuh-clack!

In Brooklyn, white flowers bloomed on the branches of trees overhead.  Dogwoods, I think.  The neon lights from bars and Laundromats reflected off of their petals, changing them blue and purple and red in parts.  We dropped Jo off at her apartment.  Justin came next.  We rode together along the water, Manhattan to our left, shining and sturdy and glowing brightly.

“I fucking love New York!” I yelled.  “I fucking love New York!”

And then I rode alone, just me and the moon, my love of the place having come back, just like riding a bike.

Hipster Love Stories: Leslie

Their plane came down over a city of dead trees and sad backyards.  Los Angeles, with its strict gridlines and repetitive rows of boxed one-story houses, glistened in her memory, disappearing swiftly as they approached the ground.  Leslie looked out the window through the tired eyes of a sleepless flight chasing sunshine too quickly across the globe, rushing towards it with a stupid haste.  Just a week before she had been in the same place, crying into her sweater and struggling to breathe.  She felt better.  Relieved.  Less burdened by her own thoughts.

She was home.  Her other home.  Back to her peeling paint city, dirty as it ever was.

When she got on the subway she felt alive and not dead.  The previous two weeks she had spent pent up in her own thoughts, the masochistic running of a movie made of disappearing memories through her head – how he said thank you to servers in excess, his second choice of beer if the bar didn’t carry Stella Artois, the bent bristles of his abused toothbrush.  She had to remove these memories, replacing them with the things that she had thought about before she met him.  Success, work, paying bills, other stupid boys built for breaking hearts.

On the subway the air was still and deathly hot.  Leslie’s body had acclimated to the absurd Los Angeles climate.  Sunny days.  Seventy degrees.  Bare legs.  She felt sweat rush to the surface of her skin and cling to her button-up shirt.  Her cashmere sweater, leather jacket, and sleeping-bag-esque jacket ramped her resting temperature dangerously close to overheating.  She felt her heart race in her chest and her breath shorten.  She looked around at the 8 a.m. work crowd – a hangdog group if ever there was one – and wondered why anyone would want to live in a city that made them look so awful.  Leslie looked better, having stayed in the sun long enough to acquire a healthier flush and a few new freckles.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, she heaved her luggage above ground, rolling down Cornelia Street at 10 a.m.  Spring had snuck in while she was away.  The breath still escaped her lips visibly if she huffed hard enough, expelling the air and turning into magical steam, but her bare hands did not burn as she walked – a welcome change.

The birds had come back, chirping like idiots and jumping through naked trees.  They conned you into thinking that they were perched in lush and verdant trees overhead.  In this, the birds were liars, preemptively stoking your desire for summer three months before it was scheduled to arrive.

She opened her door, pushing aside shoes and stacks of mail, coming home to the mess that she had left: piles of clothes in the bathroom strew over small white tiles, dishes in the sink, an unmade bed.  The vegetables she had unfortunately purchased the morning she left had gone bad; the kale rendered a sickly shade of lime green.  All of it was evidence of how little she had cared about anything else but being sad.  She just wanted so desperately to leave, and so she left.

Leslie peeled off her layers and crawled into her messy white bed.  She grabbed her cell phone filled with too much of him – the things she was too weak to remove until just now.  She thumbed through photographs, pressing DELETE while keeping her vision protectively blurred, not wanting to make sense out of shapes she knew pertained to him.  When she was done with that, she moved onto emails that she had stupidly held onto and then reread for some sort of clarity as to what she had done or what happened to them.  She would never find anything here that would make her feel better and so she removed them, too.

And when she was done, she picked up the pieces – her clothes, her sheets, her dishes – and she made all it right again.

Payoff

Ten degrees has made all the difference.  I lock my house with a silver key, not wearing gloves and not needing to.  I walk down my street with its barren trees, listening to the provincial sound of my boots against the concrete.  In a few months they will sit abandoned in the back of my closet, banished in favor of less sturdy things, strapier and feminine.

Spring is a smell: wet pavement and trees about to fulfill promises.  It’s the sound of skateboards traveling over buckled concrete, attached to boys in baggy jeans, shirts rippling away from their backs.  Bicycles carry pretty girls with their long hair and heavy coats; their giggles come and go like a fire siren, loud and blaring and then immediately gone.  Cars pass with their windows down.  Rap music.  Pop music.  The man in the burgundy Subaru is back, screaming show tunes out his window while he makes circles around Bedford Avenue.

I check the branches overhead, looking for telltale green buds to confirm my hope that we have reached a clearing in the weather.  Just two hours ago I was planning my escape to Nicaragua or Mexico – any place that only required a duffle bag filled with shorts and sunblock.  But I can’t leave the city now, not after putting up with two months of garbage.  This is the pay off, today and on.

The park is covered with developing grass, remarkable amounts of green poking through intensely saturated dirt.  Prickly brown pods litter the ground beneath trees I don’t know the names of.  Oak, maybe.  The pods sit on the dirt and wait to be swallowed whole or decomposed.  We used to crush these underfoot as children, making them explode into a fibrous mess.  “Itching powder,” we called it, and would jam it down the backs of our enemies in fits of nasty laughter.

Provoked birds fly overhead in an intense flapping of wings, the sound of rustling taffeta or falling stacks of paper, traveling together on an unseen path, riding currents I cannot feel.

Old Polish men congregate around green benches, talking in their voices that sound like tapes being played in reverse, warbled and hugging to consonants.  Baseball bats connect with white leather balls with that dense aluminum ping.  Sickly pale faces crane their necks towards the sun, praying for their greenish translucence to be alleviated.  Lovers walk down sidewalks holding hands, coming up for air.

 

Hipster Love Stories: Hana and George

She woke up the next morning, her body still sore in the strangest of places: collarbone, rib cage, the bridge of her nose.  Hana didn’t realize how wasted she was until she ran the evening back in her head.  It had been a speedy mess lasting somewhere from seven in the evening until five in the morning.

They were in between kisses when George looked at her and asked, “You gonna come home with me?”  He reminded her of a little kid who would one day grow up to be a serial killer – dark rings around his eyes, unkempt hair, an uncontrollable twitch that meant he was constantly rubbing his nose with the side of his thumb.  He was like a modern day Goddard character, beautifully affected and doomed to some well-orchestrated fate.  “Yeah, I’m coming over,” she said, “I was always coming over.”

George laughed because he hadn’t thought she would.  George thought Hana wasn’t the type.  He thought Hana liked expensive dinners and expensive men, cleaning her sheets every Sunday no matter how many times she’d slept in her bed.  George thought she drank sparkling water from foreign countries and was sort of employed as someone who didn’t do much of anything.  He managed to think highly of her and dislike her for it at the same time.

Hana wasn’t broken enough for him, George knew that much.  George liked girls with missing pieces and family tragedies – girls whose mothers never loved them and who paid their way through Harvard giving blowjobs to the locally affluent.  That was what kind of girl George wanted, because no matter what he did, no matter how shitty he behaved, nothing would compare to those scars.  No matter what, they would see George as some sort of savior from their past.

Certain things George thought about Hana were correct.  She was broken in places, but had maintained the self-awareness necessary to stay well balanced.  She enjoyed cleanliness, but she grew up camping and peeing in outhouses at midnight.  She didn’t buy designer handbags and she didn’t date older men.  When possible, she bought organic food and tried to keep the lights off in her house when she wasn’t using them.  She was thoughtful and courteous by nature, though she didn’t find either quality to be terribly off-putting.  There was something soft about her, which meant boys looked at her as a desirable acquisition to inevitably ruin.

There were great differences between the two of them and it was a wonder how they ended up at dinner together.  There was something about the evening that felt like a science experiment that was producing surprisingly positive results.  Hana generally avoided trouble in her life and when she looked at George through the smoke of his cigarette she knew he was bad news of the worst kind, but she pulled his face closer to hers and kissed him deeply.

Hana was a smart girl, but when it came to love and dating she was, as her friends often told her, a fucking idiot.  She was notoriously too willing to look past things that would inevitably drive her away from a person, so long as it meant that right then, in some weird moment, she felt needed or loved or liked – at the very least – in some vague capacity.  This would be a problem for her.  The need for validation of her existence by a man was a dangerous habit that always left her worse for the wear.  In a year’s time she would reach the point of jadedness that allowed her to not give a shit about anyone but herself, but it would take about seventeen boys after George before she reached that sad point.

And so as they sat outside, mouth to mouth, Hana ignored that his tongue tasted like ash and tar, she forgot that comment he had made back in the restaurant that erred on the side of demeaning, she pretended that males were emotionally available beasts – and she would think these things and keep on living in this lie until George, like every other guy, disappeared.  And then, of course, she would regret going home with him that night and she would regret each and every bruise.  But for now, she just wanted to kiss someone, go home with someone, grope someone until they liked her.

 

Hipster Love Stories: Jeremy and Jessie

Jeremy caught the train and he was drowning in gratitude, not for the train itself – though the moment deserved small mention – but for everything that had ever happened to him.  People had always spoken of closed doors and open windows and Jeremy had found himself bothered by the prospect of destiny and fate; he was a scientific man with a logical mind.  Metaphysical principles had never before interested him.  He liked hard facts, numbers, chemistry and arithmetic.  He preferred baking over cooking, not because he particularly liked sweets, but because it was an exact science: the perfect cookie was achieved not by flavoring things on a whim, but was the result of specific measurements and a combination of ingredients that interacted with each other in particular ways.  This was until last Wednesday when he met Jessica Paulson.  Jessie, that was how she introduced herself, looking away while blonde hair fell against her cheek.  Jessie.  Jeremy said her name in his head and he cracked a smile.  He had been smiling a lot lately.

The train commenced its journey and in that moment, everything felt very visceral and real: “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” playing loudly into someone’s victimized eardrums, the man with the pink button-up shirt and black rimmed glasses, the neo-punk teen with large safety pins affixing a piece of cloth with the words “IT’S JUST MY” to a black beanie.  Jeremy surveyed them fondly, knowing that one day they would be part of some fleeting memory within the context of some greater happening in his life.  There were all here – at this place, at this time, on this very train, in this very country, city, under some snow-covered street in Brooklyn – for a reason.  They had to be.

Jeremy thought of how he and Jessie had met and the small, obscure moments that had to be achieved in order for them to have ever crossed paths.  Sure, there were larger decisions that had been made: moving to the city from Atlanta, breaking up with his girlfriend of four years, having been at the restaurant on her shift.  Those were the obvious parts.  What interested him more were the smaller moments, ones that you would need a microscope to find.  You could splice their meeting up into an infinite string of possibilities.  What if Jessie had sat next to a sick kid on the subway last week and caught the flu solely because of her placement on the train?  What if Jeremy had gotten food poisoning at her restaurant some years back and never wanted to go there again?  What if…what if…what if… It was useless wondering, really, but Jeremy found it to be endlessly fascinating.

He transferred at Metropolitan Avenue, passing the mosaic-tiled wall, the words FAITH and FATE written in chipped pieces of black next to a teetering rock over blades of grass.  His life had become full of moments such as these – clues meant to be found if you were willing to find them – as though the universe were testing everything he had previously stood for.

His legs were long and he made steady strides towards the L train.  He could hear it approaching by its heavy rumble and squeaking breaks.  He ran for it, knowing that if he didn’t hurry he would miss it.  It was a Sunday and it would be another ten minutes before the next arrived.  Just in time, the doors open and closed with him, leaving slower parties standing outside of the scratched Plexiglas with disappointed faces and puffing cold breath.

Again, he smiled to himself, knowing that anyone who saw him would think him to be a complete lunatic; there had been nothing happy about these gray days full of cold January.  Jessie…Jessie…Jessie.  It was all he thought about.  He played the moment when he first saw her over and over again in his mind – a moment already covered in the heavy-handed nostalgia of Super 8 film – reliving the pit in his stomach and the compulsory need to talk to her.  Talk to her, he had said to himself, only it wasn’t him saying it; it was something else, something bigger.

It made sense, all of these things, in a delusional sort of way that Jeremy had never read about in a textbook or written a paper about.  He had to agree to fall in.  He had to blindly dive into his life, vulnerable and unknowing, or he would never find himself a prophet or a fool.