With the mascara staining her cheeks and the back of her hand covered in a deep red smudge from her lipstick the scene kid was showing her humanity. We were in a dark place and this girl was unloading the events of the past few weeks of her life to me. As she spoke I could visualize the events from her point of view and that of her friend. I ordered another drink and shifted in my seat.
"There was this guy y'know who was totally hot and everyone talked about him. I mean we saw him at the mall and downtown," Yeah, the dream was in Colorado Springs. It's a shopteacher's handful of hours after last call and sunrise was due but it was pitch dark outside because the lights had gone out. "We were all over each other when we saw him and ran because he might see us and think we were dorks. Anyways we turned down an alleyway and completely crashed into him and I ripped my Pippi Longstockings and my friend lost her shoe and she wasn't wearing anything so her foot was bare and all disgusting." Just so you know, I don't remember their names and I don't think they told me their names. The dream didn't give me an intimation that they had names.
To my surprise I was drinking water. The kid didn't touch her Sprite. "He was so cool and helped us up and promised to buy us new stuff. The way he smiled just made us want to do everything he said and believe in everything that he said so we went back to his place." Here we go.
For the sake of brevity and the fact that I'm completely exhausted trying to convey the voice of a girl who is painfully close to graduation I'll summarize the rest. Her friend fucked the guy and caught a disease that starts with the letter "C" and had a really long name ending in a "O". Typing 'an "O"' doesn't scan right. He got it from jerking off with jet fuel on a regular basis. My harried companion was tempted to lose her cherry but was scared off as she watched the man tear her naked friend apart like a department store mannequin and dump the pieces into a hole that was labelled "1977".
I didn't know what to tell her. She didn't remember anything else like names, locations not even the alleyway where they made that fateful acquaintance. What I was able to visualize with her narration didn't grant me any insight to her situation.
The surprising thing was stumbling upon a year and a half old article in Smithsonian magazine about Samuel Johnson. It covered how Mr. Johnson dealt with his various quirks and mental issues. One of his aphorisms stood out, "If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle."
Surprising thing is that I've been relatively solitary the past month or more and lately I've been trying to fill up that time with activity. Planning my courses of personal study has kept me busy making my time alone much more bearable especially at night. I don't sleep better, sometimes I wake up around 4 in the morning and I'm unable to go back to sleep so I keep the shirt over my eyes and lay still hoping slumber will be caught unawares.
I'm sure back in September and October I would've read it but hardly understand what was trying to be conveyed especially since I was keeping myself awake to all hours of the night with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company and those thoughts were wolves circling me looking for the slightest sign of vulnerability. Man, I was so scared and alone back then. Now I'm less scared but I'm still anxious.
