Early Sunsets Over Newark

To say that this was all a mistake is to say that breathing in oxygen is wrong, because my whole life, I had dreamed that i could get as lucky as this. Without ever even thinking it was actually possible. We'd sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and painting our nails and smoking cigarettes; talking about all the different scenarios that could happen. We could get hit by their bus, and in such guilty they would take us in. We could meet their manager and start working with them as personal assistants or such. We would meet them at a show and they'd somehow find us valuable to their travels. But in the real world, things like this don't just happen.

You don't spend your whole life wishing, without any chance of making it possible, and then somehow, magically, wind up living with your idols. It never happened. Not in the real world. Maybe in a terrible made for television movie. But this, this was our lives, we're talking about. We were just young kids, still in high school, still planning our lives out. I can't tell you if this was an act of fate, or an act of god, or if somehow a magic wizard sprinkled wishing dust on us. All that I know is that this is crazy. But i don't regret it.

The year I turned 19 was the year that everything changed. For the better, I can't say. All I know is that I thought I would follow through with all of our plans and that nothing of greater significance would happen. I think it's safe to say, that I was wrong. I had worked full time at O'Charley's, and had finally saved up enough to get us the hell out of Florida. Sammy had saved up tips and paychecks after working part time at Wendy's and then switching her career status over to bagging groceries at Food Lion. Together, we were going to be unstoppable. The night this all started, I had picked her up after work, and we went straight to my house to load up all of my packed boxes into the back of my 1989 Honda Civic. When the last box wouldn't fit, I figured we could ditch it. At her house, we shoved her one little suitcase into the back seat and were on our way. We listened to CDs via a cassette to CD adapter and my old walkman, smoking cigarettes all the way across the interstate. Somewhere between running out of cigarettes and getting hungry, we had wound up in the backroads of Georgia.

I pulled the car into a small little side of the road lot and we walked five minutes down the road to a gas station diner. We ate the greasy food, and bought a carton of cigarettes that we paid for with quarters. On the walk back to the dirt lot, we had already lit up. Which was probably a good thing, considered what had happened while we stuffed our faces.