| dewy decimal |
2003-05-03 - 12:19 p.m.
Shari's cigarette, propped between her knuckles, smoke like filthy incense. USA Golds, the cheap ones usually paid for at the check out line with Safeway brand soda and faceless tubs of hair bleach. Pensive channels of smoke vanish into the sweaty wanderings of the joyless and the dead: her vein-laden obsession.
Beneath the colored curtains of her long straight hair, I witness an audition of thoughts. Repertoires of sing-songy violence throw themselves out of her eyes with each frantic skip. I am looking at Shari. I notice that between the dry, rapid blinks, there are hurried costume changes. Suddenly, the sour underbelly of heaving men fills my tiny car to its modest capacity.
Even when we go to the supermarket, Shari reveals a bottomless bag of endlessly macabre shoes and crumpled wardrobes that tentatively sit in the awkward distance of the backseat. "Might get hot," Shari explains. My eyes rolling astonishing distances. Her purse filled with things: scotch tape, portable sewing machine, a phone that never shuts up...
She doesn't notices but I stare at her through an admiring periphery that has turned itself into a concerned crowd. After 11 years, still curious.
The Honolulu skyline lowers an ominous bow. I start fantasizing about lovely, violent storms that cut me with tiny, efficient daggers of rain. Wind bludgeoning me against fastened walls. Then an unrehearsed giggle rolls out of my mouth upon realizing this strange desire.
"What the fuck?" snapping at her own undressed vulnerabilities, my own psychologies.
"Nothing." A grin's typical answer. I recoil.
She begins reapplying her mascara. The critical compact-mirror stares double-hard back at Shar. Keep me. Keep me forever! I pray, the hardest I have ever prayed.
On this wasteful humid day, the most ordinary of days.