Wild Kindness

We sat side by side on the bleachers and got high, looking out over the empty baseball field instead of at each other. The clouds were passing in front of the nearly full moon and throwing us from a relaxed darkness into a serious darkness and then back to a relaxed darkness again. The air was smooth and pale like the light from the moon. The night was colder than one would expect in May.

I shivered under my denim jacket and began to button the buttons carefully, noticing the texture of the engraving on each one. I must have been doing this for a long time, because when I finally finished with the last button she was looking at me quizzically. Her long black hair covered most of her face as she half turned towards me. Her eyes were darker than the shadows cast over them by the passing clouds. I smiled a goofy smile with my lips pursed together and looked from side to side with my eyebrows raised like I do sometimes when I’m feeling a little stupid. A part of me suddenly wished I that was sober. But we never hooked up when we were sober. That’s how it worked. Maybe we were still too uncomfortable with the past. The years of charged proximity that had finally come to a head a few weeks before. Inhibitions washed away on a porch somewhere by a few bottle of cheap malt liquor. Or maybe it had just become a pattern that was getting harder and harder to break as time went inevitably onward. Neither of us knew where we stood and it was easier to let the drugs do the thinking instead. I did know that I wanted to hook up with her again, though, and I wondered how we would end up back in my room this time. It always seemed to take a huge effort on both of our parts, overcoming this stage. I pretended that I wasn’t wondering this because it seemed sleazy and I don’t think I’m sleazy. I wondered if she was high, too. I hoped she was.

“Nice night,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. Her tone was the same one she used when I showed her a band that she wasn’t especially interested in. “Are you really that cold”?

“Yeah, a little,” I said. This made me embarrassed and I wasn’t sure why.

I sat back against the bleachers and let out a long breath. A car drove by out on the road beyond the field, its headlights casting long streaks of light along the deserted pavement. I tried to think of something interesting to say. I was always really bad at this.

“I’ve been having this reoccurring dream,” she said after a while. “That I’m looking in a mirror and I have this big scab on my cheek. And I take my fingers and start picking at the scab and it starts coming off in big clumps. Just these big chunks of moist, sticky scab coming off in my hand. And I keep pulling it off piece by piece, digging deeper and deeper into my face.”

“Wow, that’s intense,” I said.

“It’s really disgusting when you think about it,” she said. “But in the dream I just can’t stop because it feels really good. Really satisfying. Like when you finally clip your toenails after letting them grow for too long.”

“What do you think it means?” I said.

She let breath that would have almost been a laugh if not for the sharpness behind it. “I don’t know. Maybe I need to get rid of something. That’d be the obvious answer.”

I sat with my hands in my lap. I waited for her to say more. I wanted a reason to put my arm around her, to lean close enough to smell the fragrance of her shampoo. I needed her to need me.

“Maybe sometimes the obvious answer is the right one,” I said. “Seems like people can over analyze these kinds of things. Sometimes it’s right there in front of us and we just can’t see it no matter how obvious it is.”

“Maybe,” she said.

We sat in silence on the bleachers as the clouds passed back and forth over the moon.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”