Untitled (Part IV)
21.
This is how I think the rest of the night will shake out: we’ll walk back down the pier towards our cars, towards the end of our evening. I’ll turn to her and say something like, Well, I guess this is it then, huh? Maybe she’ll say that it doesn’t have to be. Maybe she’ll suggest we go back to my place, watch a movie, eat ice cream. Something like that. She will say, Yeah, I had fun. Let’s do it again sometime. We’ll hug and I’ll look back as I’m walking away from her car and wave. She won’t see it though, and I’ll walk back to my car, get in, and drive home.
22.
We stop at a viewfinder, those metal things on the pier that you put a quarter in and look out across the beach. “Do you any change?” she asks. I say, “Fresh out, amigo.” Her face goes long and her head hangs just slightly. I say, “It’s dark out, anyway. You wouldn’t be able to see anything.” She says, “Yeah, I know that, but, I don’t know. I’ve never used one of these things.”
“They’re not really that great.”
“Still, they seem neat.”
“I can find you a quarter. I’ll ask those people over there.”
“It’s not that important. Thanks though.”
“I do what I can.”
23.
She catches me off guard. “You still talking to ‘what’s her name’?”
“What’s her name?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I’m not still talking to ‘what’s her name’.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. We just stopped talking.”
“That’s pretty anti-climactic.”
“Well, it was pretty boring so, yeah I guess that fits.”
“Hmm…well-“
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, then.”
24.
We were together once, but now we are not. One day in June I asked her, my moonbeam, though she was not this at the time, but I asked her what she thought about us. She said she liked it, she liked me. I asked her then, in the cheesiest way, to be my girlfriend. I did it the way I thought Zach Morris or Shawn Hunter might. It worked. A year later it had fallen apart, not because I drank too much or because she was untrustworthy. We just didn’t fit together from the beginning.
25.
I tell her, “Sometimes, I get lonely.” She buries her hands in her pockets to avoid the cold and says, “Same here.”
“I don’t enjoy it.”
“I don’t think anyone does.”
I shrug my shoulders and nod my head to the side. “I don’t know. I think some people do.”
“I don’t know about those people.”
“I don’t know what to do with myself sometimes. I don’t know at all about anything, I think.”
“That’s the trick right there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wanting to know what to do. You never will, really. Something, everything always is changing, you know?”
“That’s a fact.”
“Just got to roll with it, because as soon as you think you got it down you find out you don’t know shit.”
“When did you get so insightful?”
“I’ve had time to practice.”
