Portfolio Piece #2 (Ashtray)

Ashtray
on the airplane, once a silver goblet
molded to hold our glamorous addiction:
now the gaping mouth of a generation
sits at our fingertips, welded shut.

Portfolio Piece #1 (Maybe)

“I’ll drive you home,” he says, and now I have to make a choice. Because maybe he does only want to walk me home. Maybe he’s only being a nice guy, helping out a hung over girl sitting on the front steps of foreign party house. Maybe, except he isn’t, because no one ever has only one motive; maybe in some bygone era of gentlemanly goodness that never happened, but not now, never now.

I consider my options. It’s five minutes back to my house. Around seven minutes if you obey every speed limit and actually stop at the Unnecessary Traffic Light of Death. Three if you don’t. He will be playing some sort of classic rock in his car, or maybe early Radiohead. I look down at his feet, which are clad in Birkenstocks so beat up that there’s no way they were bought this century. So, yeah, really early Radiohead. He’ll play Pablo Honey and skip “Creep” because he shares Thom Yorke’s negative feelings toward the song. Anyone with sandals that trashed will probably agree with Thom Yorke.

Five minutes. Time for two tracks off that CD or one listen to “Stop Whispering”. Not long enough that I’d have to know him well to hitch a ride (which I don’t), but long enough that he’ll try to talk to me. Maybe I’ll respond politely a couple of times. Maybe he will be probing and insightful without being intrusive. Maybe he will break through a bit of my headachey, party-worn wall and expose some sort of still-raw wound by calculating chance. And that would kind of suck.

But I am very tempted to say yes to this white knight in plaid, and I will tell you why. It’s because when we pull up to my dark-windowed, empty house in his car (which will invariably be a VW Bus or an old sedan that cost him $300 on a deal), the motor and mouths will fall still, and we will be wrapped up in the silent significance of Getting There. Usually this would be a case of my being a lost hot mess and his taking a good guy stance, but it couldn’t be. Because a couple of decades ago, movies happened. They told us that it was all supposed to be meaningful, that two people can’t meet through friends or at work or something; no, that would be too normal, too boring, too easy. They told us that we must meet someone through chance circumstances, through fate, and then we must battle our ways through the rest of the relationship, hating each other and kissing in airports. They told us with pretty lips and loud voices so they couldn’t be wrong, ascribing significance to millions of moments they never knew would happen. Moments like the imaginary one that could be five minutes away in his car.

We have both seen these movies, and they have taken over our brains, even though neither of us would ever admit it. As a consequence, we will feel like something monumental should be happening while simultaneously knowing that nothing really could. And that failed poignancy, that feeling that the arbitrary nature of human interaction is somehow a sign that we will be alone for the rest of our lives is absolutely incredible. It makes me smile a little. Not at him, but at the horizon, at the glow of city lights and millions of people and ozone that brushes across the trees even when it’s supposed to be pitch-black.

“Goodnight,” I say, quietly. Definitively.

He shrugs. His Birkenstocks make waffle-iron prints in the mud as he walks away.