It’s like we’re experiencing the coastline of reality and everything that is transpiring in front of us is some vast ocean of inscrutable wonder....Oct 19th, 1996 (c.)

The first part of the movie just seems to be Teri Hatcher reclining facedown on the bed in her panties as if awaiting sodomy. As has been customary throughout the stint of the weekend, I continue to pay for everything. I pay for the ticket. The Popcorn and soda. Part of me wants to reel my hand and cup her shoulders and hold her close. Part of me feels that Megan wants nothing to do with me whatsoever.

 We continue to watch the movie. I seem to mentally get off on the fashion in which Megan cups her hand and dishes popcorn into her lips. For a moment my vision digresses from the thoughts of bending a panty-latticed Terri Hatcher backwards into acute right angles and I begin to vicariously imagine sucking the buttery residue from Megan’s finger’s one dactyl at a time.

As if in maladroit junior high drive-in theatre fashion, twice I have reeled my arm around her shoulder and twice she has just looked at me, reciting the mantra that we are just friends like some routinely memorized girl scout pledge.

An hour into the movie Megan tilts her head in my direction and tells me that she is bored. Everyone is facing the same direction with a narrative brimming over the back of our brains in a wave of particles and light.

"It should be over soon," I tell her, before asking her if she needs a refill on her popcorn and soda. She tells me she is fine.

                                                               ***


As we deport the mall and theatre I take note that the magnetic prowess of the sun has compelled the oceanic oval of the planet into one complete rotational sway, casting long shadows over the rooftops in her neighborhood. Megan is quiet. When I ask her if she likes the movie she says it was oh-kay. I think about the letters she sent me last summer and how every page was written in a different flavored marker. I think about how she told me in the first letter that she sent me that she had the bulk of  DUMB AND DUMBER  memorized. On the radio that damn Meredith Bainbridge Mouth song is playing.  Megan seems to be driving more conservatively on the spare tire. Somewhere on Northland avenue Megan scowls and tells me that I need to take a final drag and then flick the cigarette out the window since arrival to casa Snow is imminent. I take a final drag and look out the window, past the glare of my reflection, into a tree that looks like burnt cranberry.

It never occurs to me that I have been in town only 24 hours.

It never occurs to me that in less than 24 hours I will be flying back home to the only world I have ever known.

We pull into her driveway on Beechwood Ct.I’m still apprehensive that every time we enter the cozy abode Megan’s parents will comment that we smell like smoke. As we enter the house, I look at the picture in the atrium of Megan’s family taken when she was four years old, noting the little lamb who made thee look on her face, as if with every innocuous blink of her eyelids she is discovering  what the planet looks like for the first time.

 Megan’s mom is in the other room, the cordless pressed into her shoulder, taking notes about the anniversary event at their church the following day in which she is to be the MC. Her father is on the wooden back patio in front of the grill, lifts up his spatula to say hello.

            I address her father again as sir. He seems to have completely opened up to me. He is standing in front of the grill as if he is tailgating before a playoff game.

            I wave.

            “I’ll be back in a second.” I tell Megan as I thump down the stairs, rising into the wooden phone booth sized bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, splashing a palm full of cold water over my face, hoping that the solemn shades of redness from my bathroom breakdown inside Dayton’s this afternoon has all but dissipated. I look at myself in the mirror, the haircut Judy Barnneywald liked, telling myself that it’s all good boy. That you can do this. It’s all fucking good.

            As we sit down at the table with her parents’ to eat dinner,her dad takes the steak and puts it in the microwave stating that it needs to be hotter. For some reason it surprises me that the meal starts without the father tucking his chin into his shoulder and saying grace, this, being the biggest Lutheran capital since the counsel of Worms.

Behind us Prairie home companion treacles out of the speaker. I make it a public knowledge that I am a huge drooling Garrison Keillor fan and that I listen to Writer's Almanac every afternoon at 3:54 while writing poems lost in the light of autumn.

 “So, what movie did you see?” Her father inquires, biting down hard on his newly microwaveble reheated piece of meat.

“2 Days in the Valley,” I speak, Philip Brunelle is strumming twang guitar rifts on Prairie home companion. Megan looks at me form opposite side of the table.  He father smiles. In a way I am still waiting for every seated chin to curve and pretend to scrutinize the lacquer on the table as AAL riddled father slaps a Blessing on the meal. But none arrive.

“Yeah, eh, it was called two days in the Valley, it’s kinda Pulp Fictiony, very Terrantinoesque.” Somewhere, as I speak this, Patrick A. Mcreynolds is and Nathan Lockwood are miming the Madonna Like a Virgin Speech around the side, parabola diner table at Lums. Perhaps Jackie is there with her cigarette holder and lavender boa draped around her neck saying something insulting and deliberately scathing genital insult. The whole table will be there right now, Hale and Kyle and Bookbag Bob  talking about  how insightful  second city was using his Paki-stani patois.

            I use the word Tarrentinoesque again

            “The dialogue wasn’t as witty or film-noir acerbic as it was in Pulp Fiction but the plot still wasn’t all that bad.”

At the mention of Pulp Fiction Megan’s parent’s seem to reel back in a little shudder.

            “We sat through Pulp Fiction and just couldn’t endure it.” Mr. Snow says. On the radio a commercial for Powder Milk Biscuits (Made by Norweigian Bachelor farmer’s so they are not only good for you they are also pure mostly) saws into a chorus of fiddles. I feel like instigating a discussion where I intensely discuss Pulp Fiction in the same manor in which I discussed Trainspotting earlier, breaking off into Samuel. L. Jackson imitation rhetorically asking everyone as the table if he looked like a bitch?

I refrain. Mr.Snow continues to vivisect his steak holding his fork and knife at angles that look to seem that they could seriously wound every facet of my gourd-shaped masculine architecture.

I am a having dinner with the family of the woman I love. It is almost as if we have run out of things to say.

Megan cuts into her steak and looks at me like she wonders why I am here.

                                                                           ***

“Yeah, we can go back out.” Megan says, amid a clattering of dishes, telling me to wait, as she runs downstairs and picks up the two rectangular cases featuring the Nutty Professor and Dead Poets Society. Coming back out the sky is almost completely blanketed in a crisp lid of autumnal darkness. Every time we speak our breath forms little bulbs of smoke in front of our lips as if vaporous bubbles in a cartoon comic strip. It would be the perfect night to pack a thermos of coffee or hot coco call up the friend Megan was speaking to last night and get a bottle of wine and bask in an open field coddle in a flannel blanket lost beneath the overhead pinwheel of the stars.

I pad the side of my jacket as if escorting myself through customs pull out the box of Marlboro Lights and inform Megan that we only have like two left.

“We can get some more.” She says.

“Yes,” I say, “Lets also get some cigars.”

"I've never smoked a cigar before. tells me, looking down.

 We stop at a different gas station then we did the previous night. I purchase a slim box of Swischer sweets as well as another box of Marlboro lights. We fire up the cigars and walk into the tint of the newly settled evening. We find a park in an opposite neighborhood so that her parents' don't inadvertently drive by. As if peeling off a condom I unroll the cigar from its packaging and place it between Megan's lip and then add a pinch of fire.

            “Igh!” Megan says, the cigar spooned into her lips.

            “Try not to inhale.” I say. “Just let the barge of smoke savor on the carpet of your palette before allowing it to gingerly waft out through the front doors of your lips.

            Megan smiles again, taking what looks like a swig with the cigar in her mouth. The nylon shade of dusk is accompanied by a northern thick autumnal breeze echoing down from Canada as if with bangs and I find my arms buckled around Megan’s waist, my chin stapled into her shoulder like the geometrical errant  puzzle piece configured into cubist iterations.

            “Autumn comes earlier here than it does back in Peoria.” I say to Megan, taking an earnest puff. “The stars are more lucid here. They’re like galactic earrings.” I reel her closer from behind, spooning  my arms closer, stapling my nose under her left ear.

            “Do you feel it?” I inquire.

            “What?” She asks again.

Silence. If it were three weeks earlier there would be a canopy of crickets applauding us in every direction in staccato like static, an oratorio of chirps.

            “Life.” I say again. “Do you feel life?”

            Megan remains silent, adjusting her hands so that her elbows and wrist form a satellite as she takes another drag.

“Do you feel what this is all about? This film-reel of reality that seems to almost inevitably whip past us like we’re watching something in fast-forward with little staticky equatorial slashes and we have no idea what it is we are viewing or why we are vowing to it and only after witnessing and pondering the roving sheet of images in front of us we realize that we are somehow a vital part of the plot and the overall script even though the script isn’t solely about us we can’t exist without it nonetheless . It’s like we’re experiencing the coastline of reality and everything that is transpiring in front of us is some vast ocean of inscrutable wonder.”

I massage the sides of her scalp. There is a playground that is abandon. Behind us there is a hippie couple playing hackie-sac the dreadlock girl pirouetting even though she is wearing what looks like a home made flannel dress.

Megan takes another drag off her cigar in a manner that is sexy.  She clambers up the first two rungs of a monkey bars while I (keeping my cigar in tow) inhale, do a little chin up in the center of the metallic apparatus, before hoisting my entire anatomy across the central ladders.

            I ask Megan if she would like to get on top of the monkey bars and sit next to me. She tells me that she is fine. I offer her my hand like a wing for escort. She thanks me and tells me really David she is fine.

We sit next to each other not saying anything.

I then again quote her rumi. I tell her that the moment I heard my first love song I started looking for you, not knowing how foolish that was. I then tell her that lovers don't finally meet somewhere, that they are in each other all along.

            “It is beautiful,” Megan turns to me. “You are a poet. You really do see the world in a different way.”

            “That’s because I have a beautiful girl to inspire me.” I say. Megan hushes out a smile and looks down  past her shoes and into the mulch below, as if damp wooden shards configured like states in a geographical gradeschool puzzle would be any comfort to dampen the impact of our gradual fall.

I wreath the limbs of my arms around the front of Megan’s body, slowly reeling her into me, kissing the side of her cheekbone in an ardent fashion. The moon seems stranded overhead,  as if traced into the chilled autumnal sky. Overhead a few stars seem to jism into flickering spangles out of control.

            “It’s lovely.” Megan says.

The scent of a bonfire lingers heavily in the distant.  For some reason as we leave and head towards the car I tell her that its good seeing her once again. I call her Meg.

Megan keeps spitting, as if she is watching a baseball game from a dugout.

            “It astounds me that you like this town so much. I mean, there’s really nothing to do here.”

As we walk to the vehicle I again squeeze her hand.  As I get lost over the lavender hushes of the squinting sun voluntarily being superseded by canopy of incendiary star-wielding darkness, as I casually puff on the corky punctuated cardboard dregs of my cheap cigar while simultaneously hearing Megan sporadically spit, I realize that somehow, after the stage curtain toppling drama that enfolded over the last 24 hours, everything, in this moment, is perfect indeed.

I look back at Megan and exchange a smile as if I am volleying back to her everything that has been burrowed inside my chest since ever I kissed her outside O’hare the sounding of airplanes heralding overhead in searing thrusts, cutting into the atmosphere in a ballet of aerodynamic glory



                                                                      ***


We drive around chasing the last splashes of autumnal light. We arrive downtown at Peggy'.s Megan orders a chai-tea while I slam three mochas. Further down College avenue the bars are agog fraught with drunken laughter. An hour later we find ourselves in the same video store we were in 24 hours earlier. Megan doesn’t seem to like the joke I make about the possibility of bumping into Bob in public again. She is holding the twin plastic cased videos in her hand as if some kind of mid-week scripture class, handing them back the the clerk behind the counter.

We do not know what to see.

 We have just spent the most intimate moments together of our trip thus far watching the sunset and then firing up cigars and then watching Megan aim and expectorate at an imaginary spittoon and now it is like we are not finished. We still need a cartridge to lease for a twenty-four hour period and allow narrative images to float out from the square in her downstairs basement and purportedly instruct us with meaning for what we have deemed this moment of time and the next thing we know we see our movie, the movie whose dialogue and antics we emulated all summer over the phone, the movie we combed the shelves looking of r less than 24 hours ago only we couldn't find it, now right in front of us, as if fate.

"I can't believe they have it. Now we can watch it together."

I smile. I pick up the cartridge of Before Sunrise. I jut towards the counter.

I pay.