The Neighbor Girl's Notion of Depravity
He told me through a tripping tongue and dry eyes he’d just gotten out of jail. Well, not directly; a recent acquaintance of the both of ours informed me behind a flat hand in hoarse monotone while he was wobbling back with another beer. He was trying to sleep with the older lady down on Pine Parkway who waddled out in the late evening to feed hateful cats. She never had anything besides cheap so-called “lunch meat” of a deviated and questionable quality. However, she had her wits about her enough to deny his feeble attempts. This only spurred him onwards to grope the middle aged woman in the foam wedge flip flops and the two piece aquarium thrift store find from the mid-nineties. She was cheaper than that three dollar disaster of a suit and she somehow finagled her way away from him too.
Now he’s grabbing you by the face; you aren’t interested when you aren’t intoxicated. You aren’t into getting wasted and shit faced like they want you to anymore. You type a few notes into your phone and get up to go. The whole time he’s been babbling in the background. You imagine how the scenario would’ve gone had the toothpick stripper in the neon yellow had come back instead. You dip out and start off down the hill, realizing what a mess you seem to have made over the past decade. Well, that was an exaggeration, but the past ten weeks at least. And now you’ve signed a lease and you’re repairing all those leaky holes that caused you to think you needed liquor and limitless interaction. As you debate your music selection for the impending walk home, you ultimately decide everyone’s bored and anxious for something that will never happen. You envision derelicts in the night, lurking behind over grown shrubs and hedges, ready to pounce. You’re contemplating the fairly plausible possibility of being mugged as your knees squeak at the tilt of the topography. It’s not enough to cause any great alarm, and you do nothing other than clench your keys between your knuckles, ready to maul anyone who dare come towards you. As you trod further and further down into the valley, your mind wanders across memories of the past few hours until you’ve unwound all the way back to last Thursday morning. Assessing your current surroundings causes clarity you decide you aren’t particularly sure you’re ready to dissect and feelings of distain and confusion of deepen.
Eventually you arrive upon the notion that the whole set up is helter skelter, a mismatch of the hicks and the hood rats. Regardless of how terrifying it is you used to still be insatiably curious about the depraved human condition that causes close-mindedness. However a few months taught you looking at someone long enough will lead to inevitable eye contact and that’s when you get shot. You can’t question the vastly different ecosystem, hell even universe, you see to have dropped down into. You’ve tried to but you have no starting block to push off.
You’re surrounded by tweakers and ancient paranoid wisps and pillars of people, all speaking nonsense. Just the other day you saw a peculiar looking lady downtown who appeared to be snorting and instead fell over off the trolley stop and shriveled up until completely motionless.
You were there the whole time they were carting her off.
You saw car after car swipe by, plastic like the credit cards they were loaded on by their calloused owners, complaining at the history of the streets, cobbled and uneven. But then, you aren’t any better. You didn’t do anything either.
You didn’t do anything when that poor boy was going to fall backwards and crush his skull.
You had the phone in your hand. You knew he wasn’t ok. You knew. And you let a distraction cause you embarrassment and you tucked away your care are you turned your head and clambered up three flights of stairs into your comfortable fortress, far away from whatever horrors were plaguing that man down in the parking lot on the corner of fifth.
Subconsciously you know you won’t ever be able to forgive anyone who would encourage ignoring another life in limbo.
You’re becoming a recluse more and more, day after day.
copyright September 4, 2014