The neighborhood girls are chain-smoking cigarettes outside waiting for someone to notice them. They refuse to notice anyone else (youth in its paradox). God has set the air at a perfect 80 degrees. Winter is over. People around us are musing, eternally, about how much of their lives they’ve spent sitting in cars. There’s trash on the street. Everything is concrete; the city is winning its war on nature. But weeds still come up through the cracks in the sidewalk to take back what they can.
We live in the north. We spend our time in the sun. We drink iced tea from plastic cups spiked with whatever we can find. We walk the streets in new sneakers dropped online at early hours from secret sites before anyone else can get them. This is what we do while the rest of the world crumbles around us. Money is the most important thing, but beauty is still the greatest currency. Except, perhaps, the ability not to feel or care. Staying cold is gold. Time is money and it is on our side. To care is to die drowning in someone/everyone else’s problems. And being young is the only thing we have. People don’t know anything about us more than that.
We’re near corner door in the alley where Bella went to have an abortion. There wasn’t anywhere else she could go, no one to help. A sister far away, I heard, and a mother who told her she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place.
She wakes up early in the morning to run. She spent her paycheck on new running gear: shoes, shorts, headbands. I sleep in late and wait for her to call. We wait for something to happen. She’s sweating and smiling when she’s finished. We were raised by wolves, she says, and the only thing that brings joy is bettering the self. I tell her that’s nonsense. There are many things that bring joy. Connection, for one. Good food and music and friends and disappearing into the night under the stars that remind you both how big and how small everything is.
Through the trash a skinny black Labrador puppy, so skinny her ribs show through the fur, sniffs our palms with a half-eaten something hanging from her mouth. She sits back on her haunches, watching us, quizzically, sadly with her head cocked to her side. Cars pass on the street. We watch her too. And we sit there for a while, just like that.
A breeze blows cigarette smoke past us on the street, and it will always remind me of home.
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