I ain’t livin’ life like I should; PS I’m still your friend

We sit under the vast blue umbrella at a small round table and the waitress with green tattoos on her neck shuffles by, the corners of her tired breasts visible through the slit of her black man shirt. You light a cigarette and the smoke looks like a tiny soul rising up into the moist summer sky, and I figure it just might be the Marlboro Man going home.

You say something like, “I don’t think people think of you like that.” And for the first time I believe it because before I always thought they did “think of me like that” but now I don’t because I know your eyes don’t lie.

Sitting across from you, when my heart is in the chair beside you doin push ups, and I so want to say, “Hey, me and you. How about it? On an island, knee deep in the blue blue water. Hand in hand. No beginning. No end. No middle. Because you can’t time happiness. Because it isn’t a race. Because it isn’t a word. It just might be me and you together as the world burns down around us…but I don’t say it.

I pour beer after beer into my mouth like a small fire has been burning intensely there, a fire set by my doubt burning on the words stuck in my throat. You smile and my jaw drops a notch and becomes unhinged; smoke and words pour out.

I look inside through the vast glass window to the bar and see lonely people seated there, skin sagging white like that of plucked and deflated chickens, cigarettes drawing life from their lips, inch by smoldering inch. The only thing for them waiting in bed is their drunk. The only thing to wake up to, their alarms and the death grip of their hangovers.

“We shouldn’t have waited so long to get together,” you say.

“No we shouldn’t have. I love talking to you,” I say and immediately I know that it is the wrong thing to say so I swear. “Shit,” I say and I keep swearing after every sentence like I’ve got Tourett’s Syndrome and I think for sure I’ve really fucked up but…

Too my utter fucking surprise you LAUGH and it sounds like rain hitting a roof and us dry inside looking out.

I close my eyes.

“I don’t want to be “that guy,” I say and open my eyes but you’re not there. You’ve gone to the bathroom.

You return. The waitress hovers around our table, her spiked heels never touching the deck, her tattoos glistening like the scales of a chameleon. I count out the money for the tab. In between pushing my chair in and you saying, “We should get together again soon,” you are gone and I’m standing on the sidewalk alone. I wonder where you’ve gone and whether you’ll return or if I imagined it all…I know I know I’m just your friend. That’s okay, really it is.