Entry 1: This man reminds me of the smell of a long running bookstore, Moes in Berkeley. He looks like that smell... I want to spend all day getting drunk off his words and direction (CAFE LATTE WAS INVENTED HERE!). He's worn in the right ways, precise and delicate but clearly enduring, passed from life to life one hand to another hardback hard back his back hardly broken but broken edges or just worn. Gray hair becomes silver if you articulate articulation articulotion! He tells us we are just a carnival of superfreaks. But the language is buried in the basement.. only the freaks can open the chest. He is a preacher, a prophet of the carnival. He calls to the freaks and we listen. Ringleader! Ringleader! We beg for more and let him drown us into a baptismal tub. We drown in monomania and complicated business. Give us more book store sell us whatever you can sir all we want is to drown to drown to drown. Tears are not hand sanitizer. I transplanted my mom into an ocean because I could because I read the Babysitter’s Club books, the whole series, when I was in first grade. I told him that. Can you believe it?
Entry 2:
“So… do you live here?”
He wasn’t dating her. I could tell. I knew that whatever he told me after we’d gotten back was sincere, that I was the first girl he’d met in college that he really wanted to pursue. I never took him for much of a liar. Good intentions, that sort of guy.
“No, I go to school at West Georgia.”
But they’d messed around, maybe. She’s definitely interested in him or she wouldn’t be talking to me.
“Aww. Well, how do you know Jeff?”
I hate when people say “aww” after I tell them where I go to college, like it’s adorable that I think I’m being educated there. People who do that generally attend some larger university with a more accurate reputation than my school has. These people are always girls, always assume I’m younger than I am, and are generally majoring in something their parents asked them to. These girls generally have no clue where my school is actually located and they would hate it here. I’m not interested in these kinds of people.
“We were on the same study abroad trip this summer. So, yeah…”
I give her a brief account of our shared five weeks, the things we enjoyed as a group, leaving out the things him and I had enjoyed together, the two of us. I leave out my favorite story… the first time he came back to my room with me after an accidental rendezvous at Campus. He stayed with me that night and left his sock.
She was trying to see what he sees in me, putting me in some box or place, a label which probably is wholly inaccurate. But I don’t mind, see? I don’t mind because she doesn’t matter. So I look at that boy who does and I feel a little crushed. I’m here for a job right, in his town. I’m here, getting paid to walk around talking to drunk college students about their shitty phone services while handing out free bottle openers (note to self: pointless. Bottles are expensive. Cans are cheap.) and there he is. I mean, two or three weeks without a stupid text message and it’s whatever really. I’m not the kind of girl to flip out over some unanswered texts from a boy… I mean, we never agreed to anything. He didn’t do anything wrong.
But he’s here. And I hate him for it.
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