Lessons From the Kissing Booth

The rains came back just in time to settle the dust in my head, to cool the burn on the undersides of my eyelids. On the way into work this morning I could see my breath if I looked hard enough, the hem of my skirt dampening and growing heavy, rain beading down my legs and reviving the sticky mix of alcohol that has recently been spilled in my shoes. It won't last, but for the moment it feels like a cool cloth on the forehead during a fever.

Right now I want to sleep for a million years.

I've been rewriting some of my memories, revisiting spaces, turning the last time I was there with you into just another time there with them. Hoping to force the old memories out like the last marble in a tube. Wanting to walk in and remember not drinking beer and pushing debris around the table with a finger but instead drinking whiskey and conspiring to kidnap a rockstar.

I think you are pretending to be Michigan J. Frog, singing and dancing in front of some people, blinking slowly and ribbiting in front of others.

On the way home the sun was winning its fight with the clouds, and a patch of sidewalk smelled like a coffee shop I once knew, of speculating on the Virgin Mary, practicing my James Dean impression, and learning to roll a pack of cigarettes up in my sleeve.

I worry about what you are leaving in your wake, the poison that pools in your footsteps, the smell of burning that lingers when you leave a room. All the relics cracked and bruised and covered up with cotton candy.