Lot

by Bryan Washington

Aja on the mattress with James, in that liminal crease between strangers and lovers.

Basically we can’t keep a secret for anything. Rumors glide through the complex like vines.

She’d never tell us what it was like, but scandal transcends languages, cultures, generations.

we danced, danced, danced, to the tune of that story, their story, his story, our story, because we’d been gifted it, we’d birthed it, we’d pulled it from the ashes.

My father was packing himself up from our lives. That was his master plan. He could’ve been discreet, if he’d wanted, but he didn’t. So he wasn’t. His flaunting was a choice. The audacity made it deafening.

And we stayed that way for hours. Sitting and breathing our air.

He sat on the mattress, kneading my shoulder, lost in thought. I could smell the smoke on his shirt. I tried keeping it in my lungs, but I couldn’t do it. The air slipped out just like everything else.

Now that I’ve rolled around and had some lovers I can tell you a secret: the difference between people with the wildness in them, and people like us, is you usually can’t tell until it’s past too late.

we’d entered that part of July where the days begin to swallow themselves.

We tried our hand at a dime of weed (courtesy of Jeff’s older sisters downtown) but I spent that evening lost inside of myself, marveling at all of the space in my head no one had taken the time to tell me about.

She read beautifully, deeply. I don’t know how else to describe it.

he made a joke about the cars going by above us, something banal, but necessary if we were to survive the walk back. And that’s what we did. We picked up our shit and we walked back.

told her nothing, nothing at all, but in a way that implied that everything was, in fact, very wrong, that the most wrong thing had occurred, that wrong had become my reality.

I wasn’t sure what time it was, it could’ve been one or four, one of those hours when it no longer makes a difference.

Something important had happened. Something had changed. But I didn’t know what, so I tore a can from the plastic.

And there’s the night after graduation, when I should’ve been cross-faded, at some party with my girl, who’d already caught a little escape velocity, and Mix should’ve been at his mother’s, for one of the last dinners they’d share; but actually we’d driven, on no notice, all the way up to Austin, to celebrate what we’d been told was a new chapter in our shit. We ran out of gas halfway. It was already after midnight. Some random nigga and a vato weren’t about to flag anyone down. So we slept in the bed of his brother’s pickup, drenched from the humidity, wondering if anyone in this whole shitty country could be as lucky as us.

My mother’s the only girl in the world who smiles as sad as she does.

It didn’t take long to see that there’s the world you live in, and then there are the constellations around it, and you’ll never know you’re missing them if you don’t even know to look up.

Streets ran in conjunction, a tangle of dirty shoelaces.

Everybody out here looking, he said. And don’t know when to open their eyes.

Some days are just bad, he said. Some people live their whole lives and not a single good thing happens to them. I told him those were just the rules. He should follow them unless he had something new to say.

Poke allowed Emil to weave his fingers through his hair, and Emil asked him how he’d feel if it were like this every night.