It could have been raining. Or maybe it should have been. I was spending my way down to the bare minimun for a train ticket East, living where I could. I had known this girl before. She had a first name as a last and we had giggled uncontrolably together in painting class. I recal standing and working listening to another woman bable. She complained of having to leave her husband ans how it tore her up inside. My friend asked her why she had to leave, to which the talkative woman replied, “he farts too much,” or at least that’s what we both heard. She had intended on saying, ‘he parties too much,’ but sensitivity be damned, we laughed for atleast an hour. But that was some years back.
Since then my friends mother had died and I had been a foodbank cowboy. We were shocked to see each other that night in an art gallery no less. I was there for the free booze, but she had no excuse. Art and galleries are for people who can aford that lack of self respect. We didn’t look at paintings together as we waded through plesentries trying to recall where we’d left it. I remember the galleries over lit and the clusters of grown people cliquing off like highschoolers. I cuffed two beers and put one in my breast pocket and we decided to crawl together.
It was an easy night to walk with a psydo stranger. It was fall and ones body wasn’t ready for that kind of chill and it helped to be intoxicated with a friend. I think too, although I may be over romanticising the memory, I had nowhere to sleep that night. I do remember clearly my cotton hoodie with holes in the sleves for my thumbs, and I remember her denim jacket. We reached a warehouse art school and I lingered and picked quip spars with the assholes who worked out of the place. I stole a bottle of wine from the mobbed bar and we snuck out back, her to smoke, me to drink. We shared contempt in the people and in life. At some point it was decided I would go home with her.
We walked through the city to her apartment, which was a net old building with eclectic smells and sounds comming from the cracks benieth doors. She opened her door and peered in as expecting to be mugged. The room was in perfect order, very sparce. The lighting ws soft and yellow. I stod for a moment in threshold sipping my wine until she began to speak rapidly and walked into her kitchen and put on a pot.
Alone in the room, I looked aoround and I saw one picture on the wall. I had painted it, years before.
I had flirted with suicide that year, luckily she she didn’t want me, but I had remembered we had spoken of it years before. I noticed antidepresant packages on a shelf. Theey werent in a bottle, but in a cardboard sleve with pictures of people in cardigans writing letters on the front. Oh what price freedom.
She brought be tea and we spoke nervously sitting on the edge of her bed. She volunteered information that she knew I would take without flinching. Her medication made her numb, and comlpetetly without apatite. She didn’t make art anymore because it made her feel paniced. She briefly appologized for the unsolicated confessions, but she looked up at me, and I’m sure see saw a man with bloodshot eyes, who smelled of campfire and who had taken a great deal of talent and puked it all away with cheap red wine.
We didn’t know what we wanted. I volunteered to sleep on the floor, but she had me sleep in her bed. We kissed, rolled around and talked for hours and hours. We did the stupid things that hurt, like listened to eachothers heart’s beat in the lulls. Around dawn, she rose, bathed, medicated and left.
I lay there, the bed getting cold and the rooms alienation setting in. I showered in the dim bathroom where she stood naked everyday. I drank the last of my wine in her kitchen where she spent countless wordless mornings, I left my empty wine bottle on her bare window sill, dressed and left.