Hot Air and Cool Breeze
Summernight heat. Humidity we could float through, wade in, and drown by, if we weren't tethered to one another.
My lifeline was connected to Allison. AllieMac, I called her. She took me to this cypress sea, not far from the borders of the Okefenokee.
Bud Light cans and Marlboro, a full moon and music, AllieMac and a few strangers, and me. We sat, we sang. We played.
Her NotBoyfriend/Boyfriend was our host. He was a musician, a starving artist. No job to speak of, no future plans, he barely scraped together rent with his two band member roommates. It was all they could do to keep the shack above their heads, and the lights on.
There was no air conditioner.
The spring on the screen door would whine and pop, and the door would slam. To call it a "screen door" was generous; screen was a memory in most places within that weathered door frame, hanging in tatters and flapping in the almost-cool breeze of an old box fan.
They had a yellow lab, a big, lazy, friendly geriatric fellow. He'd shuffle right through the tatters of the bottom screen, and plop himself down in front of the drum set.
He was the band's mascot, and a crude likeness of him was painted on the bass drum.
I'd drifted out with AllieMac to this place in her old Buick station wagon. It practically floated over the dirt roads, sailing through the crests and troughs like a battleship, immune to changes in tide and terrain.
We were eighteen, maybe nineteen. She was preparing for full-scholarship adventures at Vanderbilt, where she was planning to major in English or Journalism. She was a poet, a writer, a novelist. She'd already been published before she graduated high school.
So of course we were drawn to one another.
AllieMac wasn't an inch over five feet tall. She ran marathons, she wrote songs, she played guitar. Spritely, fire-haired, fair-skinned and optimistic, she was light and hope and eager to make a difference in the world with love and compassion. Bluegreen eyes as bright as glacial ice under a winter sun, she was determined to succeed in making a change, and she lived by a simple mantra: do good.
So of course we had fundamental differences in drive, ambition, and outlook.
What we shared was a mutual respect for our differences, and our appreciation for lyrical magic and literal finesse.
Physically, I towered over her. It was in a moment, a heartbeat, a flash of seconds, that we recognized a connection between us that could change our latitude and course, potentially steering our bearing of friendship and mere intellectual draw.
It was an innocent thing, really. We were in her kitchen, she was standing at the counter, preparing lunch. She asked me to grab something from a high cabinet, so I reached around her, and she turned towards me, intending to go to the fridge. Facing one another unexpectedly, our eyes locked. I was overboard in crystal blue waters and she reached up to put her hand on my chest.
She traced her hand along my pecs, lightly gliding, gently exploring.
Time simply didn't exist.
The urge to kiss was mutual and powerful and instinctive, and yet.
And yet.
We stood there, eyes as frozen as the secondhand on the old clock radio seemed to be.
We remembered to breathe, we resisted the urge to drown in one another. She took her hand away, and time marched on.
Life's regrets are more strongly bonded to things we didn't do. I ponder these things undone from yesterdays, when I grow bored with the world's todays.
We boarded her powder-blue Detroit yacht and sailed into the swamp, and we never mentioned that moment frozen in time. That iceberg, that ghost pretending to be a hero.
Instead, we drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and learned to play "Wish You Were Here," or rather, we played at it.
We were just two lost souls, swimming, but I still wish I was there.