For A While

“I'm going to be a writer, you know?”

I peeked up from behind the banged up acoustic guitar sitting awkwardly in my lap. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Maybe a journalist. I don't know, I feel like some one has to expose what's really there. Ya know, like,actually there. Beneath the bullshit.”

“You're a great writer.”

“Maybe. I don't even need to be respected or even really terribly important. But I want to tell people something, ya know? Somehow.” Alice takes the untouched bass resting in her own lap and sets it gently by her side on the carpet. This carpet was much older than me and had surely seen many horrors and, hopefully, just as many treasures. I'll admit to spending too much time sat upon it. It trapped dust and voices, secrets and mumbles I'd told to myself in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep. It held the weight of the songs I'd sung in this room and the beat my feet pounded out as I danced while my parents marched rallies and wrote angry pieces on politics. It was the home to young, curious bodies and various previously loved instruments and that was all for right now and for a time coming. Some ash from the joint Alice rolled for us fell onto the grey shaggy carpet and now that was added to its collection. I returned my hands to its position on the fret and played the same chords over and over again to one of the few songs I'd been able to teach myself.

“Come, as you are,” Alice sang under her breath as she exhaled, extending her arm with the joint in hand to me. I stopped momentarily to take it and inhale. The scent had already swelled the room but I couldn't even think about it. There was so much else to cloud my mind. Like this thick smoke that made my brain blurry and the way her eyelashes brushed against her cheeks, which flushed red as she sang, despite herself. When I continued playing, she resumed her singing, “as you were, as I want you to be.”

“As a friend, as a friend, as an old enemy” we sang together, giggling as teenagers do while our arms kept extending to share this new thing with each other. “Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don't be late”

We'd shared a lot of things together, it was written on our faces and in the carpet of this small box of a music room that sagged under our constant weight. “Take a rest, as a friend, as an old memory.” My fingers slowed to a stop and I craned my neck to press my lips to hers, the large guitar keeping our bodies apart.

“You sure your parents won't notice the smell,” Alice asked, eyes darting around the room. I couldn't stop the riotous laughter from rumbling out of me then. Placing the guitar beside me as Alice had, I ignored my sudden eruption along with her question and leaned in for another kiss. She let it linger long enough for me to smell something other than the weed this time – her. Patchouli, mostly, diluted by the sheen of sweat building on her forehead and the back of her neck.

Alice took a moment to steady her breath before stretching her legs out in front of her to languidly wrap around my middle. Snubbing out the joint on the sole of her sneaker, she spoke with her neck craned as though she were deep in thought, “I'm going to write something important that some one will read. I promise, Ollie.”

The small town house was sold when I graduated high school and the music room with it's collection of bursts of human thinking and feeling and promises went with it. New people put a bed and materials and a small child in that room and their things pushed all of our memories and promises aside for new ones but somehow, despite the odds, this one managed to stay.

I still listen to her demos sometimes. Pure and stripped, raw and vulnerable. Alice.