I walk down a road of dirt and dust and sunsets unending wondering about the world I’ve left behind and I decide it wasn’t the kind of place worth fighting for. Not anymore. Not since she told me what was what and that was that.
If I could tell you what she meant, I would. There are some things a man can’t answer for. A woman’s mind is one of them.
Things I have in my pocket:
1). A Zippo lighter with an iron cross given to me by my uncle who fought in the big war
2). A sense of self-doubt
3). A pack of Pall Mall cigarettes
4). A sense that the 90s were the best of us
5.) A picture of you
When she came home the other night, she told me that Dennis McLintock was in town and that she planned on seeing him later. I told her that wouldn’t do, not here. Not in Rochelle, IL. Not where the corn met the HWY. Not in the places so outside the city as to not even be considered a suburb. Too many people talk. Too many whispers. Too Much too Much.
She told me to go fuck myself and that she wasn’t a thing to be moved about in my game of chance.
I told her she was over my head and always had been. She simplified; she said, you can’t tell me how to be in this world of madness. I suppose she was right.
If I knew myself well enough, I would’ve known to end the conversation there, but I don’t, so I didn’t.
A non-exhaustive list of things I find bothersome:
1). Going into a store and feeling like if I leave without buying something I will have disappointed somebody unknown to me and also my mother
2). Looking at art in a museum
3). Drinking and not drinking
4). Entering into a series of questions instead of a conversation
5). Trying on shoes
6). Going to your house
7). You coming to my house
8). The Internet
I left Rochelle and drove to the next town over and went into Lord Stanley’s and had too many MGDs and then crossed the invisible line that separates Lord Stanley’s from The Annex and ordered and large bacon pizza which came to my table in typical Northern Illinois fashion — party cut and cracker thin with too much cheese.
I am alone and the night is old and the moon is doing the two-step across a cloudless sky and I am smoking out back because the liberals in Chicago and Naperville and Aurora have instituted a statewide ban and it’s cold but not so cold, so I can’t complain. She’s either with Dennis or not with Dennis and I suppose that that doesn’t matter at the moment. Except that I am wondering. Except that I am thinking she is. Except that if she isn’t then I don’t know who she is with.
Beer drunk and high on fumes of the night I crawl crab-like through the muck of a mind that’s beset on all sides with thoughts unarrangeable and I decide I need a moment of clarity to offset the evening.
Growing concerns as I see it:
1). What Dennis Hastert did to the Republican Party in Illinois
2). The price of an Italian beef at Tom and Jerry’s
3). The Junction Eating Place no longer having a smoking section
4). Beer nuggets
5). Not having a team to call my own with pride
I walk the train tracks. I walk them at night. I still have no clue where she is. She is like a wraith in my mind. Opaque and unyielding. I am like a phantom on the tracks moaning my discontent to a world that doesn’t care. If I could change that I would.
I never drank beer in the daytime. Only when the sun makes its escape. It’s a rule I have. Fat lot of good it did me, in the end.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
The train approaches.
I go into my pockets and take from there my lighter and phone and throw the phone because it’s not needed.
I light.
The train comes.
I never found out what her plans were for the evening.
A complete accounting of things that happened after:
1). I don’t know.
