Erasers impress me every day

I open the front door and push on the screen. Heat hits me in the face and I'm reminded that it's still a damp Tallahassee summer. But it's better than a dry August in San Antonio and I step onto the stairwell, clutching a water glass by the base, full of pale white wine. What is this place? Does heaven have magnolia trees and a collective sweat that drips down the backs of it's citizens? Is my Aunt Mary there playing spades, the Tia that I remember. Before she got sick and her body regressed into the ground. Make me whole so that one day I'll see you again.
But I'm also reminded of the shortcomings that would prevent me from reaching peace and the ghosts that have only recently left this place. I knew that you were here, I could see you in the faces of every passing driver. You were on the next bar stool and drinking coffee with me on my way to work. I could feel you, like some heavy breather without a sense of personal space. A close talker. You hated it when I claimed downtown as if I had any right to it. That was your space, too. But this is mine. Extend me that courtesy. You can have my dignity, the memories of Stone Mountain, of Christmas, of my mother's wedding. The thought of your face in my family pictures turns my heart cold. And now you're here. You can take what you want, but leave me my magnolia trees.

-August 16, 2008

Cause that's what mens do

I lost my ring. Shannon is clutching her pinky finger and looking around the floor as scene kids with striped t-shirts and tattooed sleeves dance to a house mix around us. I get down on my knees and light the carpet with my cell phone, Amanda takes a sip of her drink and raises a fist in the air pumping it to the beat. We find it and go back to dancing in the dark. You can't plan nights like this, they just kind of happen. I went from being lectured at my kitchen table, to the wooden floor of shannon's bedroom watching them play donkey kong, to the front porch smoke rising into the tallahassee night, and then some how at the neighbors house dancing with a bunch of strangers tied together by small town coincidence. Soulja boy and ratatat. Whiskey and humidity. Laugher and understanding. I kept drinking and we all kept giggling. Shannon and I ended the night on the couch passed out in our clothes sometime around 5. Maybe it was the reexamination of the concept of friendship that did it to me, but it all just seemed so simple. Friends are just there. There isn't a list of requirements to be one. There are no prerequisites. They lay on the floor and listen to you when you need to say they things you are thinking. The things you don't want anyone else to know. They let you rate boy's ex-girlfriends on a fujita scale of indifference. I gave that girl a 3, she said it was more like a 2 and a half. But in the end, friends are just there. And mine are awesome.