A Toast to Reckless Abandon

Callie was an accident in every sense of the word I could think of. The thing was though, she wasn’t a normal, everyday type mistake that could be swept under the rug with a quick apology and half-hearted attempt to fix it, but a bona fide, catastrophic tragedy. Where “sorry’ was just another word in the dictionary and nothing really mattered at all anymore.

She was a married woman falling on another’s man dick, sort of accident. Or the awkward kid who tucked in his shirt, pissing his pants on the playground and howling with tears about it afterward because no one would go within ten feet of him. She wasn’t small, insignificant or easily forgotten about, she couldn’t be swept under the rug- she was the shit that haunted you. She was the skeleton in your closet that dragged you back inside with her long, boney fingers gripped around your fleshy neck.

This girl wasn’t planned or expected or anything that people looked forward to, nothing that anyone could be warned about. Nobody could’ve warned me about Callie. I don’t know if I’d want to be, though. I wouldn’t believe them if they did.

She was everything I never looked for in a person. That was just the sort of girl Callie was.

And I’d met her by accident too. Sometime between one day and the rest of my life, when glasses were for people who couldn’t see and all the clebrities weren’t coming back but still there. It was summer, the weather sweltering and the will to live non-existent. The air conditioning was broken.

My reason to continue lay only in the promise of shark week and the satisfaction it would give Rory, which I made my duty to never happen. And that was my life in a nutshell: simple, untroubled and Callie-free. I was completely content with that.

Then the accident happened, on the corner of Rushbrook and Stoneridge, in front of the convenience store everyone had stolen from at least once in their lives and smelled like skunk. That was when I met Callie. It was the moment everything changed and everything turned to shit, the catalyst of my life.

It’s a complete mind-fuck to think how one perfect stranger could change everything I ever thought I knew. Chewed me up and spit me back onto the sidewalk with no remorse. But then again, this wasn’t any stranger, this wasn’t an ordinary oopsie-daisy, this was Callie Pope.