The store where he buys his cigarettes is only a block away. Closer once walked than it seems when he assesses his lungs’ desire from the front porch. His socks are turned inside out and his journal is filled with pages and pages of regrets. Back from the store he is on his front porch. The house was built over a hundred years ago, the oldest house he’s ever lived in, and from the street it looks like a house filled with love. It looks like this inside the house too.

He was a man with a beard, is now a man with a child’s face. He comes in the house from the rain and kicks off his wet shoes onto the pile of mismatched other ones. He sees that one of his housemates has fastened hooks for the family jackets above this pile and appreciates the work of others both know and unknown to him. It makes him feel a part of something hanging up his coat and he wonders if the jacket, army green, will be dry by the morning.

at our table we got beer. and pierogies to start. and burgers and sandwiches for after that. we talked about i don’t know what. movies i think but that couldn’t be carried on. it died and that was my fault. the ones afterwards not so much, the other two taking their turn in choosing to respond in a way which cut the conversation to a halt. when one went to the bathroom the one who stayed told me they were sad, that being separated in the road ahead, and knowing it was coming, was changing the way the two of them knew what was what in their collective world.

the meal ended and the cheque was brought and we walked and it was raining lightly and i wondered when the snow was to soon come. they were serious and i wasn’t up for carrying a conversation. there will be many more times we’ll see each other in life so that this one will soon be forgotten and we’ll never remember that one time, or that other one and what will count years from know is how tonight’s hang out and all those we’ve forgotten have condensed to create the connection between us now, as we’re dying.

read these words, read where i’m coming from and try to see yourself in me. is it possible? can one person even attempt to speak for the lot of us. they can if they are true to how they feel and they are true to the feelings that keep pushing such speech forward.

i have been with a woman, a woman who said ‘do anything you want’ and yet given the range of such possibility i did not know what to do. it showed me that if not the world but at least i need boundaries to contain myself within. one day this will all be over for me and on that day i will not be able to think back to this time of typing on my front porch with a beer at my side and a rasp in my lungs. but i won’t be sad because i won’t know that i miss this time because this time is gone. tomorrow i will awake and stress over the words i have yet not read and the mother i have to entertain and make believe that i am happy and stress free. typing those words i can feel the future and can rejoice in the time it affords me to pretend that everything is okay.

how it must feel to birth a child. how i can’t see into the future to know whether this will be a feeling i get to experience. it seems a gift and what does it mean that already i feel myself worthy of it. the future is not scary, what is deep within our souls is. count your blessing young one so that we all may come to feel the warmth that you feel now.

does feeling a breath of alcohol that is 6.75 percent make up for any previous transgressions? of course it don’t. are you asking me what it feels like to not have anything to say when you’re standing beside an acquaintance trying to make friends? i feel lonely and i feel full all at the same time. i feel that the world will never know this secret blog of mine. i think to the time that i die and the people close to me who will find all my journals with all my scribbling and what they will think yet they won’t find this. this is true freedom that the world has afforded me. this is the flame that burns the words that would have been seen had this been written in a time before blogs in a time before anonymity. and see how i spelled that word wrong and see how the red dotted underline corrected it and pointed me in the right direction. see what the world has to say. see.

i guess what zoey had been doing these last few days was driving her newly purchased turtle green vw bus back from the valley where the mechanic had raised (and safetied) her new beast. she went with dave, my best friend, her fiance, her life partner, her person that she’ll know for the rest of her life. on the way back their music died and they got to that place in 3 year relationships where it’s possible to be bored beside the person you love the most. they started talking about mind reading, esp, and if their connection made it so they were close enough and true enought that they could feel, know, sense what their lover was thinking. they started with colours, and moved to vegetables, can you guess what i’m thinking about, no?, let me send you the vibes i’m feeling that will tell you it’s a grapefruit i’m thinking about. that’s what they were doing. and zoey told me they did pretty well in her estimation, 20%, 3 out of 15, which she was over the moon about sitting beside me in the coffee light sun her hair her smile shining further and out as she told me without telling me how much she liked this boy she liked that she wants to like for the rest of her life.

and then we started playing, zoey and i. we started with fruits. it was my turn, i thought of the fruit and she tried to sense it. i picked a pear and when it came time for her to guess and for me to try to pass the sense of this pear onto her, i thought of a pear, a green unripe pear in its crunchy-ness, and i thought of someone washing it in a sink made by money, the water running down and dripping, falling off it. and she didn’t guess it. she guessed grapes i think? and so we moved onto tea. she guessed black, i had chosen sleepytime and she laughed. adn the man beside us on the patio, with his laptop and his business adn his serious face had smiled. because he likes sleepytime tea?

today was warm that got warm while i was on the bus, wlaking from my house, so that i chose my clothes for the day poorly. by the time i made it to the patio at main and 26th i was sweating in my sweater in my pants during the silence that lay between zoey and i as we thought about the fact that her and i really weren’t tuned into each other. before i got there she had been reading a book that somebody before her had read, somebody who liked the book so much they went out to the office supply store and had bought those post-it notes that were thimbles in size that could be put into pages of books when a particular passage jumped out. i looked at that book and thought about questions. i looked at that book adn thought about that cover, its green and its confidence.

i wanted to get a coffee because i had been up until 8am working an overnight shift which made me resort to sleeping until noon, 4 hours, and jumping out of bed, washing my face and making my way to zoey half asleep. the coffee shop. we were sitting at a coffee shop, of course i should buy some especially now that i’ve come into all that money for the next two weeks which stems from me house-sitting my dad’s dental hygenist’s mother’s house while she goes to my dad’s dental hygenist’s son’s graduation. she paid me 200 bucks! what will i do. for one thing, i’ll buy a coffee earlier today sitting with zoey at main and 26th.

just before i went in to buy this coffee with all the money i had zoey turned the conversation to what i was about to do. her plan that she would think of a word, and while i was talking with, ordering from, the beautiful woman behind the counter with her tattoo’s and style, i would come to sense this word that zo had thought of and come to incorporate it into the conversation with the beautiful barista in front of me.

and then it’s my turn. i’m standing, i’m talking, i’ve ordered and we’re in that awkward 2 minutes where my coffee isn’t ready yet and it’s her and i, in front of each other and then it hits me, zoey’s word hits me. it’s ‘balloon’ that’s the word. so i think and then i say, ‘do you know of anywhere i could go in the area to get a helium balloon?’ and she says no. but she thinks i’m cute so she’s patient and she turns behind her to the coworker and asks him, ‘do you know of anywhere to get a helium balloon?’ and he says no. and then this girl, the barista who hopefully thinks i’m cute, says to me that the guy i’m sitting beside out on teh patio (which means she’s noticed me) might be able to look it up on his computer. i don’t want to go that deep because i don’t like talking to strangers normally and i don’t want to take this zoey guessing esp any further than it has gone already and then as i’m in line, talking to this barista, thinking about an excuse where i won’t have to ask this regular to search his laptop and the internet, the woman behind me waiting to order says, ‘wait!’ what about main and terminal by the trainstation the one that just opened i bet they’ll have balloons even though when you first asked you said you preferred south main not north main. and i thakned her and i thanked the barista, adn the three of us, well the four of us, me the barista the woman and the coworker all nodded our heads together and thought yeah, we’ve solved this problem. we did it! and then i said thanks one more time, shared a smile with the woman behind me on my way out and made my way back to zo excited and certain that ‘balloon’ had been the word and that magic was about to explode all over the world in the face of me and zo on our way to work at the elementary school at 33rd that was awaiting us with all that drama because katrina had left.

i’m outside now. i’m face to face with zo and haven’t been this excited to see her in i don’t know how long if ever to find out what what is the word she had sent to me. i ask if it was in fact ‘balloon’ and she says no. it was ‘asscrack’ ugh. how am i ever able to express my disappointment?

turns out that’s irrelevant because i’m so excited to tell her about the balloon development from inside the coffee shop. we start walking south her and i with about 20 minutes to go before work starts at 2pm. i tell her the story. she gets excited despite her disappointment that i didn’t guess it was ‘asscrack’. ugh.

instead we start walking. from beans and up to king ed, past lucky comics the one that had apparently had its windows smashed in the riots even though it was nowhere near downtown. are they lying? we kept walking up main. after king ed i’ve come to feel like that’s the part of town that feels like home. red cat is there. so is solly’s. and au petite main, and splitz. and chaise. it’s a familiar area, sd galleria and all.

zo comes to say that now that i’ve brought this word balloon into the lives of all these people. the barista, the woman behind me, the coworker, zo herself, that balloons are bound to make an appearance in my life in some capacity. she quotes a month. that i should look out for balloons for the next month and their significance. i am prone to agree. something about what she’s saying queue’s me deep and i don’t know what to think besides the fact that in the future in the present that things outside of my true reality exist and that i’m blessed to know them whenever they come through.

we keep walking zoey and i. we stop and she holds my coffee while i reach into my pocket and pull out a cigarette that i need to smoke before going into work for 4 hours that i know i won’t be able to have until 6pm that night. zo holds my coffee. i make a joke about it and she smiles in a way that you can tell she’s half annoyed. i appreciate zoey.

the back story of this day involves our coworker katrina, the one who’s leaving, the one who i’m closest to and the one that i don’t know what i’m going to do in this job wihtout. she’s leaving. and ultimately it’s a good thing outside of myself that she’s the one who’s getting a better paying job that’s in her neighborhood that calls on the skills she went to school for (recreational therapy). we work, katrina myself meemo karin and casuals, at a job that has a set schedule for the next two months so the fact that katrina’s leaving draws the whole thing into drama that we can only come to know once it’s upon us. katrina’s leaving, our boss is pissed about it, she might not even give kat a good reference that’s the thing.

so this is what zoey and i were walking into. the first day after knowing that katrina’s leaving and that our boss is pissed about it. and we’ve been spending the time before thinking about what balloons mean to our lives as examples of positive community thinking. and we get into work, zo and i, to find katrina and jazmine and allistar and meemo and no karin thank god and we set up the center and then allistar tells us about the horrific accident he aided on his way home from work and we condolence him and we get it all together and then we get to the point in the day where we look at the attendance sheet and we look at what it is that’s been set on the calender for programming that day. and i’m sitting at the table. and katrina is stting at the table and so is zoey and i love her and i love katrina and all at once i love my family those coworkers and then i turn to the schedule to see what it is that’s been planned. on the schedule is only two words. ‘karin’s balloon’s’. our boss. the one we couldn’t stand and the one that had the wherewithall to be gone for the day. i can’t think of anywhere other than this job that i would rather be with these people, you know?