Monday, February 15, 2016

San Diego

Everyone likes it for its weather, and that in itself made me suspect something was wrong with me. She's there now, vacationing, thinking about moving back, logistics. It hurts to know that I do not figure into her calculus.

I have memories there walking the streets all night, sometimes sleeping in the bus station, doorways, Balboa Park. I was looking for something more real than what the others did with their weekends, walking my feet raw, drinking street wine, hurting myself. I found a girl, and maybe that saved me from what I was heading for. San Diego seemed like an on going party I didn't really want to be at - Life's a Beach, Corona and lime, gnarly dude, crystal, older men approached me on Broadway offering money, beautiful girls seemingly without brains or soul or substance. I had New England gloom and tension inside me and I couldn't make it fit there.

The desert had it's appeal though. And Mexico's brown eyes. Getting lost in a place of danger and not knowing, or caring, if I'd make it back out.

She's in San Diego now, smiling in the sunshine. I feel her.

My friends turned to demons there. The girl whose car I paid off working two jobs - hardly sleeping, rarely eating - left me for another man because I did not want to marry while so young, poor and uncertain. Crystal Meth turned Ian into a prisoner, then a homeless man, then lost for good. My mentor and best friend threw me a party the day I left for Back East. He told me he loved me and slipped a .38 snub-nose into my hand. "For the road",  he said. I saw a flash of evil in his eyes and my ultimate undoing. Something has always been there trying to push me off.

I left the gun there to menance someone else and drove the old bus into the desert feeling as low as I ever had. In those next weeks, any moment could have been punctuated with a bullet, and it would have made sense. Something has always been there to steer me away.

She's in San Diego, without me, unknowingly mingling with my ghosts in the warm, dry air. Maybe she's also mingling with new aquaintances. Maybe one of them will be the kind of meeting that changes the direction of a life. Meanwhile, her ambivalent ghost flits in and out of this room. It's snowing here, very cold, and the birds are suffering through.

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