33

Tonight I’ll take the street out here, left then right, and then left again and down by that place where we once sort of lived together, and then on out and east and past the all-girls school and the place where you sell your hands for presents, and even further past the place that serves the succulent rotisserie chickens and hard-crusted mac and cheese, and the place where I took the things I didn’t want after I met you and had to make hard decisions. Things got easier and then harder themselves, the a period of simplicity, then constant headache. This headache drones behind my eyes such that I really cannot even see the horizon much these days. I try to smile through it all. I invest in vision plans. I continue further out past the nondescript pub that I drank non-alcoholic ales during one of my attempts to curb my burgeoning alcoholism, and then further past the place where we could sometime turn off for birthday lobsters, and before that the place where appliances go to die or be resurrected, and then eventually onto the piece of curving four-land and then the two-lane branch and further onto the Hwy. 33, where always lying on the horizon is Mexico and it’s promise of ramshackled multi-colored structures and relief from the headaches in a more arid climate. The possibility to live among new others, or possibly completely alone, in a little ventilated place with an obstructed view of the sea, where all things are possible, and then I will forget, or pretend to forget, until the road crews finish the asphalt all the way, and the crews suspend the causeway to the island three or so miles off shore, or maybe to another if engineering obstacles arise, where the road ends and I can finally become Marlon Brando and you will become Morgan Fairchild, a grainy photo that fades in the forever sunshine, and I will smile until it becomes real.