The Earth

The vines that wrap around the stoic stones
Binds them without letting go

Barren soil that has no life to give
The tree obediently ages and dies
Swelling waves that struggle to reach the shore
Bear the mockery of the sand
Broken glacier creeping within frozen seas
Waiting to melt in acceptance
Brewing fire inside mountains
Anxious to erupt
Abducting tornado
Rips the stoic stones from the vines
I'm lost again
In this lonely earth

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Tijuana

I walked down the streets of this rejected city I was forced to call home for 18 years. It’s funny, in a way. I was so miserable here, but now I feel that if I leave this place forever my life would be so incomplete. These streets are unique. In this place, this city, everything is good, or its horrible. I’ve never heard streets cry as the wheels revved over them, until I took the time to listen to the metropolis around me. Every pot hole I could see one more tear of gravel chisel off. The air thick with smog and uneasiness.
The voices all around me speak in my primary language that I forgot to master as a child, but I still understood their hereditary vocals. In between all the buildings the force of one car would become the echo of the next one, and so on, and so on. The never ending cycle of murderous air. In this place I was tempted to become a speaker for the people, but I learned that here, if you work for the system you work for the corrupt, whether you like it or not. Corrupt politicians seem to “know” what’s best for us, but I see my people becoming poorer, weaker, and envious. Its at this point that I feel that I am responsible to make a difference. I look at this place, my home for years. The place I only know as Tijuana. My home, whether I like it or not. Everything here is the way it shouldn’t be. There’s a center for Alcoholics Anonymous, and next to it is a bar, where apparently beer is spelled bear. My dad is a politician here, but I fear for his life. I don’t think that my dad is part of the other crooked politicians, the ones he’s friends with. Or at least I haven’t seen it.
I keep walking down, thinking to myself about the essence of this place, and I wonder if the people that are here to protect the law have a damn soul. Here the poor and helpless are as thick as a toothpick, and the “law” is as thin as a 10 pound steak.
I’m listening to Hurt, the Cash version, originally by Trent Reznor. And I wonder to myself about all that is lost. Hurt is a song about loss, losing those who were someone, but your quest for “painless-ness” caused you to lose all that you had. Like the song says “what have I become my sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end.” I look around, I see children laughing while crying, and some crying while laughing. This place I’m so used to calling home, it saddens me. This is the reason I chose to pick up a book and read, its why I chose my future already, its because I care for others more than myself that makes me cause fear to death.
I feel so fortunate to have what I do in this side. I have the gift of water that many don’t have, I have the gift of electricity that many don’t have, I have the gift of food, that many substitute with poisonous substances. Its better to be lost in a world where nothing is real, than to feel an empty stomach eat you alive. The slow implosion.
Every time I look around this place I remember the words my dad used to say. “It’s not what it used to be.” He explained to me a while ago why that is it. In his days, he was able to walk the streets and fear nothing. Now fear roams even throughout daylight. During the day is the cops and federal police, and at night the criminals dressed in black that wear a badge. This place that used to be so tainted with peace, is now delivered from tranquility, and born into fear.
The cynicism that people hold towards the government is well earned, and now, this once prosperous place is falling apart. People are finally realizing that they are not the governments, or the law’s, chew toy. In Mexico city cops are being killed by the people, the same people that they robbed before. How many lives will be lost in the anarchy that the government created and has never taken responsibility for it. The fear and oppression has become the maul and anvil that forged a sword and created anger and fury. One by one, people will keep dying.
I close my eyes sometimes and imagine this place without the law. It would probably be a safer place. A place like this, a miniature metropolis, is forced into abandoning its people and focus on the plague called tourists. Some people think this beautiful place is well off, but go a couple miles towards the mountains where the sun is the only light bulb. There you will see what our great nation has created. The place where God bent over and took a nice shit. No, not God, she isn’t that cruel. It’s the people that let themselves be raped and slapped around. Fear is the sign of a powerful dictatorship, well fear are the bullets in the cartridge that every “law enforcer” carries.
A good 50 miles away from the border towards the north, is another little city called El Florido. Its this place, the place where people let themselves be raped, that I see what I really have. I never thought I would see cardboard houses, I never thought I would see wells that are running dry, I never thought I would see the way things are really run.
Here in El Florido, take notice that it is still in Tijuana, is where the “law” is not ashamed of their corruption. Wear a badge, might as well work as a pimp or a drug dealer, all working for the drug lords. I saw with my two beady eyes a cop going into a drug house to pick up his daily salary. I saw it, and I still feel angry. The sun sets and the law is no longer the law, the law is the criminals, its those that make their living off the living of others.
In this place, where politics mean as much as throwing away the trash, you view what humanity really is. You see greed, injustice, and those few that try to stay legit are killed away slowly, and carefully.
When I’m finally home I sit and think. I remember those with crooked faces that need help, and I remember those with the crooked jobs, and think about the crooked faces they beat to a pulp. I think about all that I’m willing to lose just to help the masses, I would give it all up, even my soul just to see a child smile from a day a school, not because of the glue he just breathed.

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momis

I am left with nothing but insatiable awe. And no, it’s not enough, and it won’t be, at least not on this juncture of time. I don’t know if my linear prison will ever shatter, and conjoin the other trail, that runs parallel to this one. I wish it so. Because let me tell you, these tunnels run side by side, and I know them both soundly. And in the other, we waltz eternally to the harmony that echoes through our friction. I don’t know if the means for juxtaposition will be established, but I wish it so.
I do know, though, that purity finds solace within her eyes. Undoubtfully, grace in a method of upmost beauty flows through her. She was standing on the side of the road, with a certain inadequacy, a tender fashion, awkwardly, almost shamefully. And that, in itself, is the most unseen, but prized quality in this overwhelming sea of artificiality.
The seconds that I dared explore her smile were most generous in their illustration, in their precious illumination. Yes, the sorrow is daring, and unforgiving, but gorgeous in its display of innocence. There has not been a single moment of my trite existence that has basked in such an overwhelming desire to relieve and to protect. Never have I felt such a zealous impulse to somehow, and at any cost, salvage an endangered light-beam.
Darling, I would kill to lick your wounds.

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Song to Tijuana

Another cold winter night spent crossing the border.
The cold steel of the car
juts and jolts
over broken by-ways
and
battered boulevards.
Down the main boulevard,
careful for children
that run in the black of night,
under the dim, yellow street light.
Round and round
the glorious glorietas
where yesterdays failed leaders
stand tall and proud
in rock and stone,
for all to see
on the merry-go-rounds
of carbon and steel.
And when you look at the beat up jalopies,
that surround and consume
in worn out colors,
the drivers
are
just
as
haggard
as the cars.
And that which burns brightest
are the advertisements;
the Coca-Cola billboards,
brilliant
dazzling
lights
in neon,
in LCD.
Electricity glows and flows first to these.
Stop signs are yield signs
as you swerve around
those too eager to
wait their turn.
And the car cracks and creaks over potholes
that come out of nowhere and force you to drive
zig-zag up dark hills,
where strangers walk
wide-eyed and bushy tailed
on dirt paths littered with
faded papers
and
green glass.
Past all the countless taco vendors,
where steam rises out of
rusted, oiled grills,
and the smell,
it permeates through the glass
and infects your nostrils
and instantaneously makes your mouth water.
And we drive to Libertad,
where an old woman – la guera – and her husband
makes tacos
out of their front yard patio,
covered by
faded,
stained
tarps
to keep out the cold
on freezing winter
nights.
And they always watch TV
silently,
obediently,
as they grill the food,
and she hands it to me
with hands covered
in masa and maiz,
and smiles as we say
"gracias."
We sip on rice water
that's sweet with cinnamon,
and goes so well with the spice of the salsa.
After,
we pay their son,
who's in charge of the money,
and wears a sweatshirt from our high school,
and is just a few years younger than we.
Then we leave Libertad's broken streets
(how funny that the neighborhood named Liberty is one of the saddest of all)
and make our way through
the congested arteries
in the city of faded colors.
On our way,
a column of police,
machine gun packin',
Kevlar packin',
packin' worried faces,
zoom by
lights flashin',
sirens ringin',
engines screamin',
off to fight a war
of America's addiction.
And sure enough,
moments later,
there's a burst of bullets blaring from blazing barrels.
And the eruptions continue
a moment or so longer
and then there is silence.
Absolute silence.
And then the city awakens,
and continues its erratic breathing,
as we cut off a bus caked in mud,
an old hammie-down school bus
converted for proles, peons, for la plebe.
Its so dirty you can't see through the windows.
And finally we make it to beautiful Chapultepec,
where a girl I know resides at the foot of the hill.
It's a place where the elite sleep peacefully
In mansions made for madmen,
built on the hilltop,
and a church a lies sanctioned
specifically for lawyers,
for judges,
for politicians,
­for drug dealers,
who kneel and pray all under one roof.
Sinners and saints together at the table of
God,
to commune with the host,
to consume holy flesh and holy blood.
And they all pray for the same thing:
more;
more money,
more drugs,
more help,
more peace,
more blood.
And so it is there I am dropped off,
outside her apartment,
a residence of refuge,
an island in a sea,
a place where government, society has
no reach, no touch, no affect,
and I walk through the steel gate,
climb up the stairs,
and pass the bicycles for children
who don't know of streets without holes.
I knock on the door,
the steel rattles and rings,
with every tap of my knuckle
and I wait for a moment before her voice sings,
"Quien?"
I say it's me,
the door opens,
and it's a hug with a slight kiss on the cheek.
I come in,
we sit, talking for a while, sipping
coffee from Veracruz.
As her spoken words are sung from soft lips,
note the paintings hanging triumphantly
from nails on the wall.
Mind manifestations masterfully made
in swirls of paint,
come borne on canvas,
once blank,
once nothing
like the universe.
And when the coffee's done,
it's to the artists bed,
where we lie and continue conversation.
Then there's silence
as we listen to the static sizzle sound
from the phonograph's horn,
listening to spontaneous, spastic serenades
provided by the late Charles Mingus,
Tijuana Moods to be exact,
and we listen to the music man's fingers
strum across an amalgam of chords,
as castanets slap, clap in the back,
and the piano man's cascade of keys sing,
as the cymbals ring ring ring,
beautifully,
ecstatically,
absolutely beatifically,
all the while her head rests on my chest,
subtle, sweet smile,
beautifully,
ecstatically,
absolutely beatifically,
as our fingers dance,
they waltz in swirls of air,
jazz jiving with one another,
beautifully,
ecstatically,
absolutely beatifically.
Until finally the sheets swallow us
in black blanket sleep,
and we dive into unconsciousness,
souls freed and
sink
sink
sink
through the floorboards,
through the cement foundations,
into magical Mexican mud and dirt,
until we spring up in an ephemeral dreamland,
a supreme universe of absolute truth,
perpetual beauty,
love everlasting,
but in a clap is over,
and the rapturous reality is drawn
like curtains,
exposing the mad world dubbed real.
The needle raises and it's a glance of the watch,
and sadly its time to go,
untangle limps and lips,<>
and promise another visit and one last kiss.
Its out the door,
where the city screams, howls.
Down the stairs,
the corridor,
out the gate,
a glance back,
and back into the car,
back north
to the seemingly infinite line and file of cattle
that is the border line.
The feel is always ominous,
as you wait to cross,
and white men with boots and dogs
look into yours eyes.
Supreme suspicion,
guilty until proven innocent.
All feel like they've committed crimes for crossing.
Nervous guilt always seizes as the inspector
inspects the documents and sends a volley of questions
knowing that for the brief moment your with them,
they can grant passing or hell.
Theirs is a constant power trip.
And finally we're cleared,
and we're back in America,
instantly filled with the monotonous, synthetic, chemical feel of living
only the Land of the Free can guarantee.
A land where kicks are garnered through TV shows,
and people grow fat on milk and honey,
or die due to a lack of.
The most powerful nation in the world.
Ever.
And so it's a drive back through the mechanized streets
that run robotic like clock work,
back through the boring suburbs,
where police patrol pompously and loom around corners.
Finally I'm dropped off at home,
bid farewell from the outside the car, shake hands,
let's do it again next week
and then I walk in the house and go out the back,
grab the ladder and climb up to the roof
where I can see the dark hills of Tijuana span
like a beautiful black blanket
faraway, covered in shinning gems and precious gold,
her radiant lights pulsating, vibrating, singing
to me like sweet jazz playing on velvet vinyl.

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talk

A café. The two of us. A completely chance meeting, my dear. I was one person behind you and the only thing that happened to be separating you and me was a white haired old woman wearing a frock and a dead look on her face. You might as well have been leagues away, as that immeasurable space between us was not close enough.
I couldn’t hear your voice just yet, but you were talking to the cashier and he smiled as you spoke inaudible words to his ears. Who wouldn’t smile? I was smiling and I didn’t even know what you wanted to drink. You turned, and I looked at those eyes, those burning bright eyes as you rummaged through your purse to put away your wallet. I gazed, I gently gazed at your pouting lips, your brilliant, brown, almond-shaped eyes, and your choppy hair that spilled out of that gray fedora. How funny that we both wore the same thing, my love; dark blue jeans, a white shirt, and a black cardigan – sleeves rolled up. I thought to myself, how wonderful: we already buy everything in double.
And I rushed to order my coffee, and silently, shyly took my place next to you at the counter. We both simply stood there, staring off, my mind jumbling to try and think of some witty way to introduce myself to you. But instead, all I could do was stand frozen, staring off in the same direction as you, wondering what you were looking at.
What were you looking at? I was looking at you, as you took your coffee and said thank you, and for the first time, I heard your voice, your soft, whispered voice. I got my own coffee and followed you outside, taking my seat at the table next to you.
Then I slipped into a dream, a quixotic, poisonous dream, and I saw the future spread before me like a brilliant flash of green that appears as the sun takes its eternal dive into the ocean. I saw you and me, me and you, walking down life’s empty highways, with only ourselves for company. I saw beautiful, rain soaked days, spent listening to your phonograph in the shelter of your bed. I saw us, tangled in the white sheets, your brown skin such a contrast. I saw wonderful, sun soaked days, spent on the green fields of the countryside, peering up from that sacred spot near the willow tree, watching those sublime clouds pass over head. I saw us, sheltered by the high grass that kept such splendid, tormenting secrets. We were in love, madly in love, and I saw a constant glimmer of hope in your eyes, your endless eyes.
We talked, we always talked. We talked of everything I liked and everything you liked. The way you spoke with your hands, the way they fluttered and waltzed with the words they were coupled with. You laughed and you covered your mouth, though I don’t know why, because, my dear, you had the most beautiful laugh in town. And then there were times when we didn’t talk at all, and we sat there, simply, lovingly sat there, enjoying the music of our muteness, the mute sound that we ourselves created and basked in, my precious Marie.
A vision, a prophetic vision seized and crippled me. You, me, the feel of your head on my chest, your arms wrapped around me, and the endless sound of the sea crashing against the indestructible rocks of the shore. What a rhythm: the beat of my heart, the ebb and flow of our breathing perfectly synced, and the incessant splash of the waves like cymbals against land.
I fell in love. I fell in love with the moment. I fell in love with you.
I slipped deeper into the dream. We made love. Our bodies were vessels to another world. The point? We were one - a union of life, of movement, of frenetic energy. Two minds, two worlds, focused on one ecstatic ending. Our souls collided, for a moment their explosion stretching out to infinite proportions, to the tip of the honeymoon crescent that drip-dropped moonlight onto our skin, and the vibration of infinities crossed time and space to the dying stars that pricked the black canvas of the finite sky. They were the eyes of the universe that dazzled on like a thousand dying embers as they witnessed and recorded every conjoined movement of our imprisoned souls, incarcerated beneath our dying flesh. Our skin rubbed, creating hot, hot friction that burned like coals in the fireplace of our souls, producing sweet, static sweat that made us melt into each other. The clasp of hands, the bite of your teeth, the melody of a moan sent up to heaven to make the seraphs jealous – and then, in a moment that transcended all forms of boundary and restraint – a transient flash of heaven in all its splendor glazed in the glow of your eyes, the glow of your eyes.
But then the dream turned sour, my love, and I suddenly saw the apple rot before my eyes. My dear, I was the worm, a terrible, vile worm that ate your feeble core. Or so you told me. My addictions, my terrible, howling addictions became too much. And my sadness, my crushing, unconquerable sadness was too much of a feat for you to take. You swore you’d eat my sorrows and make me better, but you soon discovered you bit off more than you could chew.
“I can’t do this!” you screamed. Oh, how I hated it when you screamed like that. The way your voice trembled and broke, my dear, it was always such a crack that it snapped the chords of my soul. I promised, I promised I would change, but how many broken promises does it take for you to walk away? It took a great deal, my lovely Marie, but you finally did.
You finally did.
I saw it happen on a night that appeared like any other. We were in bed, listening to your phonograph once more, and you were staring into my eyes and I was staring into yours. I saw something turn, something fade. Once golden, it all turned a dull and ugly gray, a gray that I hoped I would never see. But then I shrugged it off, lied to myself that it was just a phase. So I took my finger, and traced your body one last time. I started with the soft, upward curve of the corners of your lips, then your almond eyes and across your furrowed brows, and finally worked my way down your neck. My hand ran across your soft, brown skin, making a journey of your body, back and forth, back and forth. Until, at last, I fell into a sleep, a deep and deadly sleep, and when I awoke, I was alone.
I was alone.
You took all you had, except for me, my love. Except for me and that phonograph that put me under a poisonous lullaby, as you packed all your belongings and slipped into the night, leaving me for the worthless trash I am.

And so I awoke from the dream, still next to you in the café. You were almost done with your coffee, and I was still there, weighing the good and the bad. I stood up and began to walk away. But then I turned, for one last glimpse, only to see that you were watching me walk away. How could I walk away? My eyes met yours and I could not resist. The honey taste of your skin was still fresh on my tongue, the sweet tulip smell of your hair was still clinging to my mind, and your euphoric laugh still ringing in my ears. You were worth the madness and the pain.
And so I turned around.
“Liam,” I said and extended my hand.
“Marie,” you said, and extended yours.

We talked, and we didn’t stop talking. We talked of everything I liked and everything you liked. The way you spoke with your hands, the way they fluttered and waltzed with the words they were coupled with. You laughed and you covered your mouth, though I don’t know why, because, my dear, you had the most beautiful laugh in town. And then we didn’t talk at all, and we sat there, simply, lovingly sat there, enjoying the music of our muteness, the mute sound that we ourselves created and basked in, my precious Marie.

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On Sticky Floorboards

He sat on the torn and tattered couch outside, in the back yard, as he listened to the heart beat of the party, that is, the drums, the tambourine, the ecstatic foot-stomping he heard all around. His feet they were tapping too, but it wasn’t out of love of the moment. No, it was simply out of reaction, impulse, reflex. His head was not there – not in the bottle of cheap Russian vodka that was slowly emptying into his stomach, or on the psychedelic hash pipe being passed around and passed back, nor on the tablets he passed to the girl sitting next to him whose slurred words or rolled eyes didn’t tempt him in the least, but tempted the tattooed hipster sucking on a cigarette as he gently stroked her bare arms.
No, his head was faraway as he mindlessly navigated through the sea of broken beer bottles, broken dreams, broken nobodies. Friends were crowded inside as they danced on sticky floors, grabbing, grinding human flesh for a false feeling of fading partnership, fading fast into the night. The loud strum of the steel string acoustic madness emanated, burst from the beat and broken guitars and loud cymbals slap, and the clap of a dozen hands, the feet sweeping, the dervish whirl of the dance floor, and the croon of the strung out singer, strung out like the base chord, E chord. This, all this, had grown too tiresome, too heavy on the soul. So outside, on the front porch, alone with the lonely stars that hung isolated faraway, he lit a foul, filthy cigarette, and listened to the crackle of the burning paper, the drowned out madness inside, and the screeching tires, peeling on a turn topped with a magnificent grito, somewhere there, in the slums. For a moment he was far removed from the ugliness of this tragically beautiful lifestyle.
“What are you doing out here, Elias?” Walla asked, between hiccups and slurred words, clutching a glass of Andre. “The party’s inside!”
“I know, I Know,” Elias replied, taking a final drag from his cigarette.
Walla grabbed and brought him into the mindless dance floor, in the midst of the sweat and the static energy, where he was swallowed alive by the magnetic swirl of the beehive. But once a sweet Mexican beauty with black hair, honey lips, and the slight smell of gin slipping with her words came and hung her arms around him, he stopped caring about the lunacy. Just like that, he succumbed to the beauty of the madness, the eloquence of sin, the apple. He bit down on the apple, on the neck, tasted her sweet sweat and she let out a soft moan. He forgot about it all – the bad, the sin, the emptiness inside; the black vacuum of that fabled area where the soul once dwelled; and the dilemma of losing faith with one’s self, his life, his salvation – it all was brushed under the bed, while an act of contrition was performed on the sheets above. The sheets, they tangled, they swirled among limps, among sweat, among human flesh and sounds – it was all blanketed in someone else’s covers, someone else’s bed where they would lie not caring and not knowing that two people joined at the hips and became one for a feeling of fucking. It’s a phenomenon of mutual consumption and abandonment, as they both moved naked with one another, completely foreign to each other, eyes closed, unable to stare the sad truth in the eye. And when they finished, they reach for cigarettes, as they talked as though nothing happened, nothing ever happened, a kiss on the cheek at most.
And they talked. They talked of yesterday, of the sixties, and she wished she lived in the sixties.
“Cause, you know they were wild times. Wild, wild times. People were free, and they felt good, before the government came and closed up the collective euphoria of the people, you know? This country has come run by fascists, you know?”
“Mhhm,” he said, and he listened to her drone about the fascists, then Marx, and then some how dived into Beethoven, and his ninth symphony and Ode to Joy, and how we’re all going to hell, and then spoke of Nietzsche, and how God is dead, and the true path is Buddhism, though she hasn’t completely made up her mind on whether she likes Zen Buddhism or one of the older, Indian variations more, which brought her to Kerouac and Snyder and their adventures in The Dharma Bums. He said Kerouac is full of shit, and she grunted and continued on as though he didn’t say anything. He didn’t care, he couldn’t care –she was just like the rest of them, as he watched her lips move and words stroll over pretentious sentences on subjects that didn’t interest him in the least – at least not after sex. She continued to talk as he stopped to look at her naked body in the light from the bare bulb that hung, swinging from the ceiling as people talk a thousand miles per hour outside their door. He looked at her soft brown skin, the freckles on her arms, and the tattoo on her forearm. It was of a Lotus Flower and had some Buddhist chant written around her wrist. He sat up and smoked a cigarette, and pretending to listen until her tongue grew too tired and she left. He put his clothes on, stood at the breach of the door, and watched the moths flutter, shriek, and dive down, down, down outside the portal. There, the world was burning and the moths were fluttering in the fluorescent halos of the electric lights, in a desperate attempt to achieve a false nirvana, a vain pursuit of eternal happiness, perpetual youth and beauty.

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A View to Admire

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera once wrote this of love: “… loves are like empires – when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too fade away.”
If I were to choose the single idea that held up the seething monument that was my first love, I would assume that it was innocence. Our love was that of two children who had never known the maps of other people’s body. We were each others cartographers and nobody else’s. Hence, after the split, we both reached out and grabbed the closest piece of flesh we could, and made love to the sin, and with each thrust into the other’s body, we snipped at the final strings of innocence. And so, the monument’s foundations were rocked like bedposts, until finally, it crumbled before our eyes. Up until that moment we shoved our respective tongues in other people’s mouths, I do believe we were still capable of fixing what we broke. But the damage was done. We stood in the rubble of what was our former love, blankly starring each other in the eye, incapable of comprehending the repercussions of the actions made in other people’s sheets. All we could do was stand in disbelief of what once was a love to swear by, holding bits and pieces of the grand puzzle, vainly attempting to find fuel in the fossils to rekindle the fire.
It was a view to admire.

July 25, 2007.
That is the exact date which will forever be engraved into the stone tablet that is my most infallible memory that Disney is full of shit. Yes!
Disney is full of shit.
Since I can remember, I grew drunk on the optimistic ideals promised to me through the innumerable movies produced, animated, and directed by the grand American ideological propaganda machine that is The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS). They never once mentioned how cruel people could be when they are willing to wash two years down the drain for an older guy with a desk job and a new Mercedes Benz. They preached nothing but rainbows and butterflies.
October 16, 1923.
That’s the date when brothers Walt and Roy Disney created the hideous monstrosity of DIS. That was the beginning of the end for the respective sanity and love life of Americans everywhere. And people wonder why divorce is on the rise…

So here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, nervously tapping my fingers on top of the wooden table, trying to gather what ever coherent thoughts run across my jumbled conscious, into some linear train of thought. But as I check the watch, with every sweep of the second hand, the task grows more and more seemingly impossible. I look at all the others around and I can’t help but wonder if they can sense that two former lovers were soon to congregate for the first time in months, and all for some simple, idiotic reason (I’ll get to why later).
And as I’m tapping my fingers, I can’t help but think that this isn’t at all how I wanted our final goodbye to be like. I wanted something dramatic, perhaps set in some Paris café in the bustling Latin Quarter, on a dark, stormy day. I wanted rain to run down the window, I wanted an Export ‘A’ Light cigarette resting on my lips, and I wanted something wonderfully appropriate to be gently playing from the speakers – the Beatles, “I’ll Follow the Sun” off of Beatles for Sale. Yes! That is exactly what I would want playing. “One day you’ll know/ I was the one/ But tomorrow may rain so/ I’ll follow the sun.” Not too loud where it would drown our dialogue, but loud enough to where she and everyone would notice that someone’s heart was on the verge of breaking. But instead I have to settle for a cookie cutter Starbucks, a warm day in February, sun shinning through the windows, birds chirping outside, and some cheery Tony Bennet song blaring from the speakers.
That’s when she walks in, wearing dark wash Hudson jeans and a black Lacoste polo. She takes off her sunglasses as the door swings closed behind her and she takes a look around, her soft brown hair radiating in the sunshine. She should be drenched, miserable and cold, with mascara running down her face. Damn her.
She walks up and sits down.
“Hey, how are you?” she spits with a sassy smile, while chewing gum. Orbit probably. I hate how I know this. I hate how I know that at this very instant she is chewing Orbit Sweet Mint gum. I hate how I know that the only reason she hasn’t rushed to order the biggest mocha frappacino is because the squeeze of her jeans was a bit more than usual and she’s probably starting some low-carb diet. I hate how I know she probably isn’t wearing any underwear because she never wears underwear, and once upon a time only I knew this. Now the number’s rising.
This is one of the worst things about serious break ups: you still know everything about that person. You still know their mannerisms, their likes, their dislikes, their soft spots, their hot spots. You know them better than they know themselves and it doesn’t count for shit. All that time you spent admiring them, tenderly recording their actions as they observed yours – that’s all time you’ve got to spend erasing and crossing out when the break up comes. It all amounts to a mountain of mental paper work you have to put in the shredder. But even after you shred the papers, there are still bits and pieces that come up like lint in your jeans.
I don’t say anything in reply and instead retract a letter from my breast pocket. I hand it to her and, from under the table, I hand her a paper bag filled with ashes and soot.
“What is this?” she asks.
“A letter and a bag,” I say.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Read the letter.”
I wait a moment. I invested too much time to just walk away without reaping the visual fruit that’s about to unfold. And sure enough, within a minute of reading the letter, she pulls down her sunglasses over her face, just like I knew she would, and the tears start rolling down from underneath. I listen to the music for a second… Tony Bennet’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Eh, close enough, I figure. And with that, I get up and walk away.

Main points of the letter:
1. Don’t ever talk to me
2. I don’t care about you anymore
3. Our post-relationship friendship isn’t worth it
4. Ernest Hemingway once said (summarized) that you only write for two people: yourself, and the one you love, whether she is dead or alive
5. I no longer write for you, I write for someone new
6. The bag is filled with what’s left of everything you ever gave me

Call me vengeful but I think I’m allowed to be. So as I walked away, I looked at her blushing cheeks and the tears that ran down her face, as she looked through the bag and saw the ashes of all the artifacts I had ever accumulated throughout the history of our love. She was looking at our burned out innocence.
And it was a view to admire.

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