retrospective 2

i remember scrounging, don’t you?

boiling water in your black hoodie

letting your tattered sleeves get precariously close to the hot bubbles

we lived in a shit hole anyways but it was ours and your dad let us stay and my dad got drunk and helped put a floor in the bathroom and i mean, we cleaned out the old cat piss and i painted and painted while you were at work, turning the walls to red and black and blue so how could it be anything but our home.

that winter we had the quaintest christmas party. nothing in the house but twenty dollars worth of decorations and beer between us and i can’t remember which year but one year we found a tree across the street and another we made one out of a tripod. it was greener that way

the warm summer months we wore shorts and from the porch we saw the church car washes from across the street, beer in hand, watching fear in god scrub hornets out of hubcaps.

and i didn’t go anywhere but i didn’t need to because i had my cigarettes and you and the bong unless we broke the bong, which we did, and we cried and packed something else and tried not to get the cats high.

an especially hot day paul rolled up in his el camino, passed out girl in the bed and we smoked cigarettes and wondered what to do but eventually we carried her upstairs and fed her veggie burgers back to health and she fell on the treacherous stoner landscape of our coffee table naked, trying to show us her led zeppelin tattoos.

one of the summer months, i moved out a pregnant 18 year old on an adderrall bender because her boyfriend was a pill head and a hoarder and i mean how could i not? i wasn’t too particular about honing my morals but damn.

the attic stayed a haven for the insane and stoned that wanted to disappear in the floorboards and clamor onto the garbage posing as furniture and i don’t know what we talked about but the only light was candles so it must have been something romantic or scary or serious which are all pretty close anyways.

and the floor would undress itself, leaving us little laminated slivers of nothing to stick in our feet and beds and carpet we should have gotten rid of months ago.

and our liver stayed stuck to the ceiling, a dark purple sac looking on with at least a morbid curiosity.