A Living Sign Post
When you're not home much people don't call. So when the phone rang at home I never thought it might be for me, but that afternoon somehow I knew it was her. All she said before hanging up was "Come over." Her voice sounded so far away I felt like I hadn't seen her in months.
I raced down the snaking path that connected our neighborhoods like it mattered; muscles burning and skin white one the knuckles. She was waiting for me at the end perched like a bird on an upturned trashcan. She flew into my arms, not because something was the matter, but because that embrace was home. She'd lifted some beer from her older brother. The brew was shit but it tasted great the way shitty beer does before you know better.
We drank fast and it was that speedy buzz that feels like a dream of caffeine. She climbed up on the back pegs and we flew down strange streets. Laughing and screaming through the black night her voice, golden sweet like beeswax, was the only thing that felt real. I felt alive with her, so it says something that that night I felt most alive; Like how some nights are mythic when you look back? that night was mythic while we tore ass through it.
That night was the first time we said I love you. This night was the first time I said her name out loud in more than a decade. It felt like I love you. It felt like the gold of her voice tearing through the remaining putrescence of the all wrong old me; reminding me of how the boy I was that night is a living sign post to the man I'm meant to be.
Just two more days, and I'll be home.