UNTITLED
♦ ♦ ♦
This is to a girl who got into my head with
all the pretty things she did,
This is to a girl who got into my head with
all the fucked up things I did…
♦ ♦ ♦
THE BEGINNING
♦ ♦ ♦
Let’s get crazy,
Talk about our big plans,
Places that you’re going,
Places that I haven’t been…
♦ ♦ ♦
“To the beach!” Four hundred teenagers spill from the open
doors of five dozen limousines, cars, and busses all alive with one hundred
decibel treble and twelve inch bass. Teenagers
rush the beach like
Stinson is soft. Her silky sand is damp and cool in the early morning breeze; her water icy and rough, her shores littered with memories. The rangers have abandoned their posts, leaving reason and responsibility for the night, ceding her sands to the teenager’s whim. The town is closed and quiet, windows shut and lights off, prying their privacy from the thunderous night.
Collectively, they make love. In the drunken stupor of 4 a.m. the chaotic harmony of love and laughter blur into euphoria under the fluorescent glare of the post-prom party. Smiling faces and screaming friends dance around them like the shining shadows of flame upon the cold, spring sand. The ephemeral rush of fresh wind and crashing waves soaks their ear drums and runs down their spines, shivering and tickling derisive grins from their lips. They are enveloped in each other, smiling compulsively, singing silently, drunk with liquor and love. It is a midnight masquerade of adolescence and invincibility under the spring sky, little glimmering moons shine from their pupils and boys and girls fall in love with each other, fall in love with life. A shooting star. A screeching car. They kiss.
“Tonight was so much fun! The dinner, the limo, the dance, the —“
“Shhh,” he quiets her, “I’m just glad you enjoyed it.”
“I did. Oh, I did,” she giggles, smiling seductively. “It was perfect. I owe you for so much.”
“Just come here and kiss me.”
People crawl about the beach in search of their own morning glory, every man with his own quest. Bottles are thrown crashing into the fire and cars go racing through the sandy lot. This is a culmination. This is a festival. This is high school. Boys in dresses and girls in tuxedos, but nobody cares. Song rises above the general clamor as voices ascend from every corner of the beach to join in the revelry and serenade. Laughter and general merriment saturate the air, lightening hearts and stifling sadness to the sound of the churning ocean. She jumps up to take a swig of her half-empty beer and join in the fun and song. He catches her hand.
“I-I love…this.”
She giggles. “I love this too. I love all of this. I love the beach; I love the breeze; I love the people and the shouting and the singing and…” she pauses and looks at his smiling eyes, “…and I love, I love you. Let’s never let the sun come up.”
“Close your eyes and it never will.”
They lay together in each others’ arms, in love with the night. The hands of time pass them by quietly, invisibly floating upon the passing sea breeze. Stars fall from the celestial sky, little incandescent reminders of existence, a flash of brilliance in the greater emptiness. She sits up suddenly, staring at the lidless night, “Why does everything have to end? What happens after tonight?”
“I don’t know. That’s tomorrow, and we never have to worry about tomorrow if we always enjoy tonight. Tonight is now, and now is perfect.”
“Perfect?”
“Perfect,” he pulls her back to him.
Waves crash. Buried beneath the sand, feet lose themselves to dance and devilry. She shrieks in ecstasy, he laughs.
“You’re crazy.” She gives him an offended glare. “And I love it.”
She smiles, “I know you do. You always did.”
“I did. It’s always been you.”
The morning is new and the party young, their youth multiplying in the chill sea breeze. Abandoned clothes and lustful couples litter the shore tangled in their tongues, naked, and disheveled, without any other care in the world. Flames burn and sparks fly, and nobody could care less about anything beyond each fleeting second of this never-ending night.
♦ ♦ ♦
It’s always you,
In my big dreams…
♦ ♦ ♦
Silence. She sits, diligently writing in her teal workbook, trying to hide the fact that she’s doing her homework instead of paying attention to the lesson. She is wary of the teacher’s glance, intermittently stopping between words to quickly scan the classroom for unwanted eyes.
Her shoulder-length, dark espresso hair, highlighted with streaks of lighter blonde, delicately falls upon her frowning shoulders in sweet-smelling strands of silk. Her hair is neatly primed and pressed, framing her wistful face in a bronze mane of flowing satin threads; she subconsciously reaches back to swipe the hair out of her face and displaces a few single strands from the neatly packaged bundle. She coughs.
Her head snaps up as she realizes that she has called attention to herself. Two slender, almond eyebrows grace the bottom of her immaculate forehead concealing the most compelling side of her splendor. She has the tender blue eyes of an angel which, in their intricacy, perpetually emit the essence of her mystery – her aura of senseless beauty and semblance of un-vindicated majesty. Her nose is simple and small, a castle of her perfection. Two tender lips lay silently below, glistening crimson with a pungent new coat of Carmex crowned by her soft, russet cheeks, blushed magenta with the warmth of life, accenting her lightly-bronze complexion. Her chin is a quail’s plume, inconspicuous and elegant.
Her deep, blue eyes jump from face to face with uncanny speed, reassuring her anonymity amidst the disarray. No one is looking; they are all consumed with their own tedious task while the teacher drabbles on at the board with her lesson, oblivious to the unconscious state of the class.
She has a small neck which stands proudly atop her slender shoulders, back arched in a cold stretch like a yawning cat waking from sweet reverie to the promises of a new day of pressure and fatigue. She watches her chest gently heave for breath underneath the immaculate white sheet painted snuggly about her young, adolescent breasts, clearly modest but always titillating. The swell of her bust wanes into her elastic and playful stomach veiled beneath the folds of wan fabric, navel always smiling at the prospect of attention. Only a gazelle could rival the long, slender strength of her tan legs. Firm from health and sensual from youth they display and carry her body upon a gorgeous pedestal of sleek force and stunning elegance. She is crafted of stainless skin, flawless and immutable, an exquisite archetype of God’s ingenuity.
There is something brilliant about her melancholy smile as she sits naked inside her voluptuous vanilla dress and sensual gossamer lingerie upon her plastic, bucket throne, lips twisted shyly upwards in a derisive grin – some magnificent proclivity to fulfill the promises of life without being marred by the trial and error of failure. She is oblivious to her absolution from human isolation; her beauty is magnetic to piety and people.
The girl slouches back into her scarlet, plastic chair. It wobbles. One of the grey, metal legs is missing a foot; the chair sits slightly unbalanced.
She is beautiful. Marred by the obvious suppressions of guilt and loneliness, but there is some unspoken will to not tarry from happiness that makes her gorgeous. Beyond her brunette mane, behind her mysterious cobalt-grey eyes, past the hormonal appeal of her teenage breasts, and far and above the ephemeral titillation of her lascivious lingerie, she is the quintessential diva of a queen. There is some natural awareness liberally bestowed upon her, some inherent consciousness of the promises of adolescence and the possibilities of the invincible age. Yes, she is brilliant. A natural aphrodisiac, but her appearance is dwarfed by her perception.
Her pen continues to feed the paper ink, stroke after elegant stroke until she tires. She is almost done and getting antsy. She keeps adjusting her position in her chair as it rambles incessantly, writhing in search of the perfect comfort.
She wears a chic, virgin dress which hugs her velvet skin like gravity. The indigenous curves of her teenage figure are savory in the meticulously painted milieu of framed silhouettes. The undulating horizon of her licentious physique is candy to the salivating eyes of young boys. A thin frosting of fine fabric lay between dream and vision, only titillating tiffany threads separating erotic hormones from her delectable skin. From under the high hem of her dress, her handsome legs protrude stridently bronze, calves waning into her small, bare ankles. Her feet dangle, able to touch the ground, but held slightly above for the fleeting feeling of freedom. Her legs are crossed, right ankle over left, feet continually swinging for a few seconds in random intervals. Her sandal-clad feet are small and clean, toe nails lacking a proper pedicure, big toes slightly shorter than the rest.
She peeks her head up again and slyly shoots her hands into her obsidian shoulder bag, rummaging around for something. They come up full, textbook in grasp, victorious in the minutest of battles but most significant, nevertheless. She fleetly flips to the pastel peach pages in the back of the book to find the one answer which has eluded her. The war is over; her homework is done.
She
gasps for air with a monumental sigh of relief as she slouches back into the burgundy
bucket of her seat. Her eyes look
glazed, her expression – tired. It is
only the first class of the day and already Konstantine is worn out.
♦ ♦ ♦
We went to my car,
She mouthed, “Is everything okay?”
She leaned in slowly,
So now I can say…
♦ ♦ ♦
Shhh. Her timid hands rip away at his sweat-soaked collar, elegantly disheveled around his craning neck. Her shoes lay despondent and forgotten in a tangled heap atop his tuxedo coat, cummerbund, and freshly un-knotted tie on the black, terry-upholstered floor. His prying fingers pine for her skin lost in a labyrinth of fabric folds, her dress hiking further and further up her trembling thighs with each incessant tug. The two convulse and contort upon the narrow, leather seat, an anxious writhing menagerie of wanton adolescence, recklessly unsheathing each other’s shivering bodies from their polyester prisons.
Just outside the cold glass windows and down the road away, swarms of partygoers migrate and mingle under the pale guise of a full April moon. Slowly, dresses and tuxedos are shed in favor of sweatpants and beanies on the chill, fresh beach. A bonfire ignites the darkness with dancing color and radiating warmth; a keg ignites the tired with jovial spirit and flamboyant audacity. Friends forge eternal bonds and burn enduring memories into the annals of their adolescence on this untroubled night. This is the apex of high school
Skin and breath clash in a bout of heat upon their lips. They relish the painted privacy of tinted glass and the color-changing, neon stars on the roof. The air is rank and saturated with lust and longing; buttons, zippers, pins peeling away with anxious zeal. A touch – cold. Soft hands – a gasp. Warm skin. Her breath. His heart. They stick and squirm upon the clammy cushions. The strap of her dress falls. The fly of his pants yields. Pleats wrinkle and silk stains, their fingers crawl. Music pulses through their veins, the crash of symbols and staccato quarter notes in B minor, their songs builds to a crescendo. They roll with the sudden breaking off the limousine.
The
squeaking of a window. Their squirming
halts. “Where would you like to go?”
♦ ♦ ♦
Standing on the edge of morning,
Scent of sex and New Found Glory,
Playing as she’s pulling back her hair…
♦ ♦ ♦
Bing…Bing…Bing…he is saved by the bell. The primitive, droning tone which governs the here-and-go of the daily congeries sounds permanently on schedule, freeing the class from the monotonous drawl of its captor.
He stands, laden with three cumbersome books under his left arm and walks towards the vacant podium at the front of the classroom and right past two barren desks out the open door into the hustle and bustle of the high school highway. The coursing menagerie is saturated with swarming caches of sloths and sprinters, pygmies and protégés, Goths and Go-Go Girls, all precariously swimming the current of the bustling hallway, an everyday menace to the common bipedal locomotion of the average pedestrian. But he is not impeded by such lowly creatures. He pilots expertly and effortlessly through the maze of clumsy bodies and meticulously maneuvers his mass past on-coming traffic into the downstream flow of students without as much as a stutter-step of effort.
He follows. In her wake he stays, in stride, step-for-step, likewise navigating the labyrinth of foot-hungry people. He quickens his pace around the tiled corner and meets her at the stairs. Forced onward by the ceaseless surge of bodies, they trudge up the monotonous steps, their soft footsteps lost in the sea of violent and clumsy, warring feet. He turns his glance to her eccentrically striking face and finds a dazzling cerulean patina glaring back at him and for a milli-moment of time, the world stops – feet cease their chanting below them, chatter halts in a bout of serene silence and nothing moves but the two, their eyes engaged in a spellbound wedlock of hidden passion. Their eyes speak songs through their quiet compassion, a deafening silence to placate the tempest of their thoughts. She quickly looks down, timidly, humiliated for looking in his direction, but little does she know that he too, timidly hides his eyes in fear of reaction. It goes silently unnoticed as the universe abruptly snaps out of its momentary hiatus back to the chaotic flow of the everyday world.
His prodigious presence has been perfected by many peripatetic semesters about these geometric confines. He walks with a veteran’s gait, a territorial swagger in 3/4 time, sweating poise with every marching beat upon the seminary tiles. He is a charlemagne chameleon, a fabled spectacle of his transient temperament in the pale guise of the dirty fluorescent lights, infamous for emotion. His voice is shrill and baritone, still a fledgling calf which he daily strives to nurture into a mature, commanding bull with ravenous fervor for articulation. It is a demon with which he has grappled for most of his adolescence, trying to render a definitive shape for its identity out of that chaotic kaleidoscope of prose and lyric. He loves to speak and be heard actively, live the reactions of his audience, be the brain which interprets their ears, but often on his path he has been bereft of the confidence to do so. His voice in song wears quite a different façade, a daring palomino charge with the sensitivity of morning dew on a lamb’s ear. His pen is fearless and brash in pouring out his tears through its black blood. His eighty-eight black and white keys build and break hearts in octaves and chords. She flies.
He rights his gaze about the corner as she steels away through the flock, a lost bird in the bedlam of migration. He fingers an outstandingly ordinary white paper envelope enveloped inconspicuously in his right palm, a mercenary of private purpose, a messenger conjured upon bleached fiber threads. Like the single bold note in a bohemian ballad he sails the un-stepped boundary upstream, a fighting flight about her intangible apparition.
Two well-weathered and familiar hands emerge from the haze, stifling the entropy, gently calloused from too many hard fought battles and years of incident. Their gentle grasp cools his balmy cheeks.
“Shhh,” he opens his mouth to speak but she silences him without a breath.
He closes his eyes and drains his angst into those maternal palms. Their breaths meet and mingle in a culmination of love and life. A tear falls from her eye. He catches it.
“Wait.” The tear evaporates in his hand. Her apparition vanishes.
He jumps up, panting, in a cold sweat shirtless and tousled under the shroud of his sheets. Slowly he rights himself, groggy-headed and puzzled as he puts his feet to the cold, pale floor. Morning hardens his stiff joints, creaking and moaning into motion with every waking step. Half an hour makes a new man, showered, shaven, and dapper, a physical archetype with uncanny public prowess – a social chameleon. He steps out the door and inhales the chill morning breeze, a plain white envelope in hand, as Andrew starts his journey to school.
♦ ♦ ♦
I woke up in a car,
I traced away the fog so I could see,
The
♦ ♦ ♦
The door opens. “Come on! Get in the car! Let’s go! Yeehawwww!” Limousines screech about the lot, picking up their passengers and driving away into the night. Shivering, sweaty bodies crowd upon the cold concrete sidewalk under the old, half-lit marquee of the emptying, gutted theatre still festive with banners and balloons. Adrenaline and hormones abound in the night and everyone is anxious for the morning to come, high on excitement and expectations. Boys are shouting and creating mischief under the pale, white moon while underdressed girls huddle in small crowds, incessantly hugging one another for warmth.
“Jessica! Come over here gorgeous!” The two girls wrap themselves around each other, shivering in their disheveled, gossamer dresses, “You look so great! How was your night with Adam? He looks so cute in that tuxedo.”
“We had a fun time, Adam’s been…well he’s been Adam, you know. It’s just not the same as it used to be. But Andrew looks gorgeous, you guys are so lucky! You must be having an amazing night.”
“Andrew is amazing. He —“ Konstantine stops. She yearns to tell about her beautiful corsage and the roses and the limousine and his cute, black tuxedo and their dancing – but she senses a foreboding premonition.
“He what?”
Konstantine stutters to cover up her slip, looking away to hide her suspicion, “He — He just went to the bathroom quickly.”
“Oh…” Jessica’s eyes fall with disappointment and something trickles out of her chest, “…ha ha.” She chuckles sarcastically.
“Konstantine!” Two anonymous arms hoist Konstantine into the air helplessly as she struggles, wondering who her captor is.
“Adam!” She giggles, seeing his face. He puts her down, laughing. They share a friendly embrace.
“How was your night?”
“Ah, we had a blast thanks. Your girl is looking pretty hot over here.”
“You’re not kidding,” he chuckles, putting his arms around Jessica. “Hey baby,” Adam envelops Jessica in his arms. He is warm. She looks up at him and tries to smile but he sees the distraction in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Wrong? Nothing’s wrong,” Jessica lies, “I’m just tired. Saving my energy for the beach.” She reaches up and kisses him, falling victim to the warmth of his embrace, imagining Andrew’s familiar hands on her back.
“Awww,” Konstantine croons jokingly, egging them on. “You two are so cute together. What has it been, like six months now?”
“Seven,” they say back in unison.
“Wow, that’s awesome. It’s been almost five for Andrew and me.”
A limousine pulls up to the curb and opens its door as Andrew walks out of the theatre door. “Andrew–,” the three of them begin to yell, stopping to laugh at themselves, motioning Andrew over.
“What’s up buddy!”
“Hey, hey!” Andrew walks up and greets Adam, the two shaking hands and embracing. “Look at this dapper young fellow. What are you trying to do Adam, charm both of our girlfriends?”
“I do what I can, you know,” Adam says, putting his arm back around Jessica.
“Jess, you look great as usual,” Andrew and Jessica exchange a long embrace and a short, silent glance.
“And you,” Andrew smiles, turning to Konstantine, “you look gorgeous as ever darling.” They kiss, Andrew holding Konstantine, as they smile at each other. “Doin’ alright babe? Didn’t miss me did you?”
“I always do.”
“Good…” they smile and hesitate, lost in each other’s eyes. “Hey! Let’s roll. Stinson awaits.” Andrew pushes Konstantine, Adam, and Jessica into the open door of the limousine and yells for the rest of the group to follow.
Jessica, Adam, Konstantine, and Andrew sit crammed into the back of a six-person limousine with eight other friends, bodies tangled in sweaty heaps, bottles of champagne emptying themselves into glasses and onto dresses, a wild menagerie of adolescent fun. Eighties pop drives through the stereo speakers at full volume, sending Kool and the Gang and the Go Go’s pulsing through everyone’s veins, wielding an unlikely chorus of backup singers from the bedlam of drunken passengers.
Gene Simmons erupts through the limousine, joined by half a dozen shrill and off-key voices. “I wanna rock ‘n’ roll all night…and party every day!” Flashing neon lights line the back seat, changing colors in a battle against the threatening darkness. Each turn of the limousine sends girls tumbling across the back seat, tangled in their dresses, high heels, and hair pins, crashing into glasses and bottles, playing musical chairs with the boys’ laps. The cab crawls with jittery excitement, everyone anxious with anticipation for a sleepless dawn.
♦ ♦ ♦
This is the last true burning letter,
Given to a girl,
Written by a boy,
Living in a world created to destroy…
♦ ♦ ♦
“Twenty three, thirteen, six…” Click. Konstantine stands in front of her open locker with a busy urgency to her book shuffling. She meticulously sorts through her lunchtime anthology of textbooks, ritually throwing the last binder into her open bag.
The bell rings and she slams her locker closed with the zip of a book bag and quickly scurries through the crowded hallway to the flip and flop of her black Reefs. An orchestra of lingering conversation and venturing footsteps resonates to the buzzing percussion of the half-lit, fluorescent lights overhead. Her head swims, mired amidst the Technicolor turmoil of a volatile mind. She treads the tinted tiles into the graffitied stalls of the girl’s bathroom.
“So what’s the deal with her and Andrew?”
“Supposedly they’re just best ‘friends,’” two anonymous voices linger at the faucets. “But if you ask me, I can tell that there’s something else. They’re too perfect together to just be friends.”
“How can you help it? If I were best friends with a guy like that for so long, I would be in love with him too…” the voices wane out the creaking bathroom door into the empty, echoing hallway. The echoes creep into the quiet bathroom one last time before silence ensues, “She is so lucky…”
Konstantine smiles. She is alone with her thoughts and an insatiable desire to pee. The bathroom beast flushes and buzzes eerily from the dark cubicle of a desolate stall. A patchwork mine field of dirty toilet paper and forgotten fluids litter the ground below her swinging feet. She sits, humming methodically to the autonomic, 6/8 splash and tick of the inanimate beast, lost in a quandary of spontaneity and anonymity.
Thought consumes her. Commas, quotients, and colonels mixed together like a variety show on Ether choreographed to a bathroom heartbeat. Suddenly – a thought. She never finished the last problem on her math homework, it shouldn’t take long; she could finish it here, in her little private palace. She hastily removes a black binder from her shoulder bag, left discarded in a dry patch on the floor, scattering pencils and papers into a disheveled mess. “Damn it!” She leans over, collecting the mess of papers back into her binder, cursing her clumsiness. She straightens the last stack of essays, class work, and quizzes. An unmarked white envelope falls to the floor. Konstantine picks up the envelope, examining it questioningly. She had not seen an envelope in her lock or her binder. She had not given anyone the combination to her locker nor seen anyone next to her locker when she got to school early that morning. The letter wasn’t for her. It couldn’t be for her, she couldn’t imagine how it would have gotten into her locker. She must have accidentally dropped it into her bag sometime during the day unless…somebody snuck out of class and slipped it into her locker when no one was looking – it was for her.
Who? But why...? What? Her head spins with questions and suspicion but curiosity overwhelms her. She fingers the outstandingly ordinary white paper envelope enveloped inconspicuously in her right palm and tears away the sealed, triangular flap hiding its contents. She unfolds an equally ordinary white paper letter, folded in thirds. Six short lines, scribbled precisely in well-sharpened pencil, lay naked and alone in the middle of the clean sheet:
I can’t imagine all the people that you know,
And the places that you go,
When the lights are turned down low.
And I don’t understand all the things
you’ve seen,
But I’m slipping in between,
You and your big...dreams.
Konstantine reads the words three times over and lets their poetry sink into her mind. It is beautiful. Somebody wrote this for her. These words are for her. The power of its diction overwhelms her and a single, solitary tear falls onto the page, smearing the graphite. The androgynous handwriting was unidentifiable and there was no signature to claim the letter. It had to have been him. It had to.
♦ ♦ ♦
Thinkin’ of weekends,
She would party in the city,
She doesn’t have a flame,
She’d prefer to burn out like a torch…
♦ ♦ ♦
♫I’ll make love to you, like you want me to, ‘till the end of time…♫ Her dirty, calloused feet slide upon the stained slate floor, naturally choreographed in the menagerie of fornicating feet, the dull murmur of the high school slow song incessantly scoring the awkward sway of young love. The humid air of clashing hormones reeks of aphrodisia and eroticism. A shy smile flashes across her lips as his gentle hands pull her closer to him, naught a beat misstepped. She curls her fingers about his broad neck and embraces the arch of his neck, deftly falling into his handsome nape. She is flush with the quelling heat of this dance and the radiating warmth of his skin, slowly receding into relaxation upon the awakening dance floor. A buzz.
The pace quickens and the electricity of life swiftly saturates the room with the punch of new music and the energy of youth; sweat resumes is parade down bare backs and collared necks. His hips grind and gyrate at the new beat, her dress jumping at the physical barrage. Their bodies clash and volley in the swarm of swing, loving and loathing the saturation of salacity and sex. He brushes her breast. She passes his lips. They part hands. They dance. Torrents of teenagers masquerade through them – he moves to the stage, she to the aft of the room. They mingle and mix with caches and cliques of blurred faces always parlaying seductive glances and distant gazes with each other from across the dance floor.
“Let’s go.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Last edited Wednesday, April
6, 2005