Chasing The Dragon

There’s a useless son in the bedroom, he won’t go to school. He complains about how the college non-credit courses are filled with adults, and when he went to high school he complained about how the classes were filled with children. When the pizza delivery boy arrives he asks mom how she’s been. “How have you been doing?” I’ve been eating out of one box of Cheez-It’s for the last two hours. I responded to the question that the delivery boy asked even though it wasn’t directed at me. The TV makes me nauseous. I’ve had problems spelling that word in the past, nauseous, so if it’s wrong feel free to take a pen and correct it.
Mom’s watching a hypnotism training video. All the women being instructed in the video are over fifty. They look like widows, with their feral hair and lumberjack shirts. There’s a woman trying to hypnotize herself not to be scared of drinking wine. They all stand like candles.
Every couple minutes I’ll go into the bathroom and check in the mirror to make sure I’m still there.
I’m very aware of how most of my emotions are futile. I know when I’m sad, and when I am I start thinking about how even though I’m sad it’s not going to change anything so there’s no point in me being sad. There’s no point in me feeling anything.
Well that earns me a psychiatrist that I refuse to go to, which enables him to diagnose me without ever having seen me. I’m having trouble confronting my problems, he says, I’m troubled. He should walk through the Washington Heights sometime at night and round up a herd of potential patients. They’ll most likely be “troubled” too. I’m sure they’d shell out two-hundred and fifty dollars for someone to tell them they’re troubled. Another two-hundred and fifty dollars for every session afterwards that he continues to tell them that in order to get better they need to work with him.
Once you know why you do the things you do it doesn’t make you stop doing them.
My brother’s a delusional hypochondriac. He doesn’t go to school because when he steps into the classroom he has an anxiety attack. He’s anxious about himself having an anxiety attack, which leads him to having one. It doesn’t help that the old women in the classes he goes to stare at him relentlessly, or that the teacher’s a mumbling wreck. I used to watch my brother walk out of his classes, and imagine the condemning elevator trips down to the ground floor. Maybe the school secretary would shake her head but besides that there was no one pleading his return.
Mom won’t listen to anyone who raises their voice, so we don’t talk much. None of us do. Occasionally I’ll exchange a few words with my brother when he comes home past midnight and gradually collapses into bed, pushing the chair against the wall, leaving his clothes in a puddle on the floor. I’d stand at the doorway watching the cat curl up by his legs and lick her paws.
I start school this week. I worry that mom’s lost faith in me too. She sits on the couch, tapping her chest (something hypnotists do very often) and watching TV.
I stick my face into my bed. My cat looks at me, a look that is somehow flat, bored, and amazed.

I’m listening to David tell me about how he enjoys going to school with his girlfriend. They retain a certain degree of separation because they have no classes together. So he never gets sick of her.
We’re sitting on the curb, watching the other boys skateboard in the parking lot outside of school. David doesn’t think too highly of himself. He’s mawkishly pessimistic, his facial expressions are caricaturable.
One of the boys lands a really hard to land trick. The board flips and spins a couple times. I don’t get what’s so special about it because it looks like all the other tricks but I clap my hands anyway. They’re not the type of guys that girls hang out with; most of their faces have been wracked by pimples. David keeps talking about his girlfriend, how he intends to align his classes with hers.
Soon we’ll hitch a bus across the bridge for a dollar and pick up a backpack full of beer. They sell underage over there. Then we’ll probably take the train down to central park and roam around for the rest of the day, amusing ourselves by making fun of people and arousing the teenage genius that reveals itself with boredom. It beats sitting at home and laughing at spelling errors we make to each other online.

It was on one of those busses across the bridge that I first saw him. He was sitting in the seat behind the driver, and someone was holding onto his wheel chair in the aisle making sure it didn’t skid. He’d open his mouth and jut out his lip when he looked out the window. He crossed his arms and grabbed at his biceps, gnawing at them with his fingernails. There was something perceptibly wrong with him, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
I watched him fidget the entire bus ride. I just stared. The back of the seat in front of me was defaced by sharpie markers. What was written there was unintelligible. The little curvy crown, swear words, hearts with initials.


We spend the entire night in the city at this girl’s apartment. She’s beautiful and feigns the kind of shyness that stares up at you with big, watery, buggy eyes. She does this to every boy that looks at her. Crying is one of her bad habits. Someone accused her of wearing a push-up bra and she skittered off onto her balcony and frantically cowered into a corner.
I ate cereal in the bathroom. I remember my hair hanging in front of my eyes with so many knots in it that when I touched it it felt like the bathmat beneath my feet. The amount of products she had in her bathroom was sufficient for everyone I live with. And yet, well aware of her…melodramatic tendencies, I slightly envied her. It takes someone who’s desperately patient to draw the amount of Japanese style cartoons she had tacked to her wall, and hang whatever she had hanging off her ceiling.
I thought they were pillow-cases. Halves of pillow-cases. I had no idea, I didn’t think anyone hung scarves off their ceiling. I’d also never seen scarves like that before in my life. They were made of silk, and had the kind of rug patterns you see in middle-class living-rooms.
She had a water bed, too. David moped under the covers of it for most of the night. I make him sound annoying, but he’s useful, really. He’s the boy that makes parents laugh, and remembers to hide the beer bottle caps when we’re all too drunk to notice.

We were on the bus back across the bridge around seven, already hung-over. The nice thing about being drunk is that even if you can’t find a way to pass the time, it seems to pass itself.

Later on in the day I see a dragon floating outside of my window. A metallic, very pixilated dragon, only a couple miles long, with vast, iron-padded wings. He just floats there. I can imagine my mother, flabbergasted in the living-room, somehow relating this to something spiritual. I lie with my body slanted in bed, roughly supported by pillows that are bigger than I am.
I wonder what dragons think about. I wonder if they get into fights with their mothers about superstitions on how to make the wireless internet work. I wonder if they forget to shake freshly squeezed grape juice before drinking it, or stop reading a book mid-way after having started it. I wonder if they worry about college, how high they’ll score on their SATS. I wonder if they stay up to unhealthy hours in the morning, reading stories by intimidating authors in the bath, kicking the faucet from hot to cold.
Alberto, the immensely misplaced dragon that floats outside of my window.

Every author has their favorite words. Mine are probably: vapid, gnarled, arthritic. My least favorite is “but.” I’m not an author, per say – I’ve never written any books. I do a lot of writing, mainly while watching boys skateboard outside of the community center.
Last night a girl named Rita gave this guy Rocky a haircut on a bench that overlooked the highway while the others skated. Rocky’s probably one of the better skaters. Being around him makes everyone else around him feel uncomfortable, as if they should be doing something to justify his presence.
Afterwards we all went home. I walked in the dark with David. We always make plans to hang out alone with each other, but on the days we plan to hang out we just make more plans. Listening to him talk, the rustle his peculiar style of movement makes (a drooping-strut), I think about what his girlfriend sees in him.
We’re heading towards the playground, down long stretches of back-road, illuminated by the lights on inside the houses we pass. The gravel is crunchy and unleveled. A woman starts walking behind us like a manic serial killer. The playground is deserted. Across the street there’s a couple mingling by the water fountain. I can’t tell from here if they’re a couple or not. They splash each other, which probably means they are. The woman passes us, giving us a look of disgust. I think about grabbing onto David’s hand. The couple by the water fountain is Russian, with matching hairstyles. The sky is swirling and black. David suggests we go to the bagel shop.
The scenery on the way to the bagel shop is very much like that of going to the playground, except that there are more fences. We pass by the middle school, where a blue-rimmed “DRUG FREE SCHOOL ZONE” sign stands right in front. It’s more noticeable than the school itself. The only way to even tell that the building is a school is the sign. But how can anyone make sure that the school is drug-free? Just because there’s a sign there doesn’t mean there aren’t kids carrying around drugs inside. I know that it means drugs aren’t allowed inside the school, but incase whoever put the sign there hasn’t noticed, drugs aren’t allowed anywhere. All the sign probably does is make middle-school students ask their teachers what drugs are.
The last street away from the bagel shop there is a man punting a dog in someone’s backyard. The dog yelps and runs in circles, painfully bopping its head. One of its legs drags on the ground. I think about calling for help but I get scared and don’t say anything. Neither does David. I try not to watch, but for some reason that feels even crueler than the act itself.
Inside the bagel shop, I start crying. The things people do to each other’s dogs when no one’s looking.

The dragon, Alberto, is floating outside of my window again. I watch him from inside of my bed. I feel like I’m floating too. I don’t know if anyone else can see him, as selfish a thought that is. He doesn’t topple over any buildings, or knock over any planes. I can picture them crashing into his wings and flimsily spiraling down.
There’s a tune inside of my head that sounds like a rhythmic clock. I try to hum it.
My mother walks in while I’m humming. She’s wearing the same shirt that she’s been wearing for years around the house; that she cooks in, cleans in, unplugs the toilet in. She says, this room is a mess! I ask her how she got in her when the door was locked and she jingles a key.

David hobbles down the front steps to the school, bumping into the rail. He looks in every direction but mine. His girlfriend’s no where in sight. I ask him what he wants to do and he shrugs, says “whatever.” We start walking, heads sunk.
There are a flock of police cars nudging a flat sedan into a corner near the grocery store. They say the cops around here take the drugs they find off of people and do them. I know they do that everywhere but they say that they’re infamous for doing that here. A couple of my friends say that it’s happened to them.
I wonder if one of these police men know my brother. The majority of them are rotund and buoyant, the kind of police men that host cookouts and baseball games over the weekend.
David and I walk in different directions at the next cross walk.

I check to see if my brother’s home. He’s not. His bed’s a mess. I strap most of the sheets back on, recover the pillows (the covers have stringy bits of dried throw-up on them), and leave the apartment.
In the lobby I purposely don’t look into any of the mirrors because I always look bad in lobby mirrors. Outside, the trees are mellow and swaying. I remember being on the couch with my friend Harris the weekend my mom went away and filming ourselves drinking beer and watching TV. There was something far too chewy in my Cheez-It’s and I threw up all over the carpet. My mom had a hissy fit when she returned. We got me throwing up on camera, and Harris talking to the TV while playing video games, swearing every time something went wrong.
Suddenly it occurs to me that I have no clue as to why I went outside. I think about all the things I could do now that I’m already outside, but even that seems overwhelming. I never understood the big deal about beautiful days. When my father was still alive he would always kick me out of the house if the sun was up. I’d sit in the backyard, pulling up grass or watching my brother play with his friends. But it makes no sense to me; there will always be another beautiful day, and my mood is sadly not dependent on the weather. I wish someone would sit down with me somewhere and explain to me what about them are so fascinating.
I call up David.
“Hey.”
“Hey?”
“I was wondering if you wanted to get a bite to eat with me somewhere. It’s a beautiful day.”
I can hear his girlfriend in the background, flustered.
“…I can’t right now, I’m really sorry.”
“Oh. It’s okay.” I pause to think of a non-incriminating way of saying goodbye. “I guess I’ll talk to you later then.”
“Yeah. Bye.”
“Bye.”

I call up another one of my friends, one of the boys that regularly skates at the community center, and meet up with him at Fireman’s park. He’s already there by the time I get there, rocking from side to side on one of the swings. He’s smoking a cigarette. There’s no one else around except an old couple gazing over at him from one of the benches near the entrance.
He barely nods at me when I plop into the swing next to his. The chains uncomfortably squeeze my thighs together. He has the kind of earphones that plug into your ears; as what he probably sees as a polite gesture, one of them is hanging out. He’s almost three years younger than me, but precocious; he acts so much older than his age that it’s unbelievable at times. Part of the reason I enjoy being around him so much is his endless supply of energy. Being surrounded by peers who are sensitive and intense, his blitheness is rejuvenating.
I’m not sure how much of his upbeat nature is related to the fact that he abuses his ADD medication. He’s constantly staring at the ground as if the patterns of dirt have greater meaning. Sometimes he’ll grind his teeth. I’m not sure exactly how much he’s taking, it worries me. He’s so oblivious that I can’t help but feel bothered if he’s exposed to anything like that. I’ll even ward off the younger girls that cross their arms and pretend not to be staring at him.
He’s experimented with drugs much more than I have. Although I don’t directly see him do them that often, when he does them in front of me (mostly just popping a pill), it’s disturbing. I know it’s petty to be so impacted by something so menial, but there’s a balance, some kind of scale that holds us all in place, and when it’s tipped, it emits a hollow, cold feeling, much like abruptly coming off one of the drugs that he uses.
He plugs the other earphone in and starts swinging. The old couple have left. Harris, who’s on the swing next to me, really isn’t that intricate. I mean, he is, but I’m sure that being me, I’m blowing the significance of this way out of proportion. I’m sure there are fifteen year olds like him everywhere that are addicted to speed. He just seems to feel more, that’s all, and it hurts to see someone who’s genuinely gifted like that be polluted. It makes me feel ineffective that I can’t save him from himself.

After half an hour of swinging, he hops off, causing the twig flooring to scatter. He motions for me to follow him, moving in his waddle-swagger sort of way, unintentionally bobbing his neck and head up and down. I lightly trail behind him. The only other pit-stop is the community center, so I sigh as loudly as I can in hopes that he can hear me through his headphones. The community center is far from here. I think one of the only ways to survive so listlessly is to tuck any sort of expectations you have of what your life should be deep down somewhere, to an unreachable place, and only let them emerge when they can be muffled by headphones.
We mope along, passing multitudes of Koreans; the neighborhood is named after them. Whites are minority here. Most of them are children coming home from school, with phony-vinyl backpacks sagging in key chains. Harris tries to spook some of them, raising his hands like claws. They ignore him completely. Koreans seem to trust their children so much more than Americans do. These kids can’t be over eight and they’re walking home alone, through a section of housing that’s in complete decay. Shingles eroding in the dirt. Popped tires hanging off branches. Even the ground seems to be in decay: weedy, muddy, uncut grass.
It has an allure though, dumps like this. The houses, although falling apart, seem like refuges. Their decay only makes them seem even more homely inside.
The gravel we’re walking on is uprooting itself. I peel some of the layers back with my sneakers. The underside reminds me of the underside of my own skin. Sometimes it still makes no sense to me that I can scar and bleed.

“Dumb bitch, she always wastes all the pills when she tries to kill herself.”
“Haha, that’s terrible.”
“It’s true. And when you hang out with her, keeping her off you is trying to keep a cat off your lap. It’s disgusting.”
“Really visual, I like it Harris. You should be a writer.”
“Fuck that. I mean, I want to write a book someday, you know, change how people think, but no one’s going to read it.”
“Why not? The authors of our generation are pretty terrible to begin with.”
“Because people are caught up in their own shit. In their own stupid lives. Whatever, you know.”
“Yeah.”
We’re in front of the community center now, waiting for more people to show up. The younger kids are here. Their laughter feels so legitimate and natural. I never thought I’d ever say this, seeing how I ridiculed the adults that once said it to me, but I wish I was that young again. Being that age you don’t think about how your mind changes when you grow up, only the opportunities your age permits you. Only if.
I wonder at what age people stop consistently having fits of laughter. What age it becomes a treat to see. Fifteen? It could be fourteen, I can’t remember that well. At fourteen I think I was locked up in my room. Fifteen I was discovering how amazing cliché phrases can be when boys say them to you.
I still haven’t gotten over that.
The skateboarders all look like feathers in the wind to me. I squint my eyes. They slap each other on the shoulders and spin in circles, flinging their boards here and there. It’s like some kind of urban dance. They clap, and cheer, and then there are periods where they sink their faces into the floor, silent. I wonder if they’re wondering why they skateboard. If they have any other purpose than to come out here every day, and try to land the trick they couldn’t land the day before.
Will sits on the curb, grabbing at his hair. His neck is lubed by his own sweat. Paul is frustrated, kicking his board. Harris is listening to music, probably coming down. David should be here but he’s not. Yesterday he was talking about how someone is intruding on his relationship, inviting him and his girlfriend to go to the movies.
I don’t know why I just started naming everybody. It suddenly occurred to me that I don’t even know all their names. There’s some kid who keeps breaking his wrist. He broke it the first time skateboarding on E in Central Park, going down a steep hill and falling off his board to dodge an old couple that refused to move out of the way. Harris said that when he fell, he was smiling at the sky as if nothing had happened. Then he got up, and skated the rest of the day, taking breaks to lie in the grass and nurse the bulge sticking out of his hand.
Do any of us belong anywhere? Or do we just fill in the gaps, the same way they close them in the air.

Harris sits down next to me and accuses me of pouting. He tries to smile, but he’s grinding his teeth. I can hear it.
He nudges me. My hair spills onto his knee. He pulls on it, and my head topples into his lap. Harris hates me, but he talks about me all the time.
I wonder what it would look like.

It gradually gets dark out, until it’s impossible to see the cracks in the street, which causes some of the skaters to go home. I’ve spent the entire day, like most other days, watching them jumble and bump into each other. Sometimes I imagine myself controlling them, strung to my mind, and I’ll run them into each other, force them to say things they wouldn’t normally say. I know they need a girl here, to sit against one of the parking lot poles and stare at them. I don’t mind. There are other girls that do it, too, albeit much younger than me. Most of them have crushes on the skaters.
One of them once asked me why I sit here all day, every day. I told her the same reason she did. She rolled her eyes, then got up and started talking vehemently to one of her friends to make everyone wonder what she was talking about.
Some of them aren’t as bad.
They make me want to wear make-up, just because they all do.
I watch Harris trying to disentangle his five dollar headphones and stare at the pricey ones that I’ve managed to break three times in the past. In subway turn-styles and taxi-cab doors.
Once everyone’s left but Harris and I, we walk home together, trudging back the same way we came. My heart begins to weigh. It’s always during transitioning from one place to another that melancholy gets the best of me. Harris sways from side to side of the road while he walks. I remember how my brother always used to tell me about how he would drink a couple beers before coming home so that mom wouldn’t think he was on drugs.
We take a break from walking at the playground. My thoughts are heavy. My head feels like one of the logs of wood that marines carry at training camp. I ask Harris if he’s feeling down and he nods. Sometimes interaction makes it easier, so I try to start a conversation, but I keep remembering that he’s fifteen. I force myself to anyway. I can barely bring my voice out of my throat, heaving it out of an exhausted well. I ask him if he’s a virgin and he says no. I figure a question like this will get him to talk. It doesn’t.
I start swinging.

Donna’s sitting on the front of someone’s car. Her stubby legs dangle, bumping into the headlights. She’s has glittery silver stars painted onto her cheek. She’s talking about she doesn’t believe in God, and how her whole family are atheists. How someone who does drugs, like Eena (I have no idea how to spell her name), is a hypocrite for believing in God. Eena just wants attention.
We were just walking home, and there was Donna. Her blonde, sunglasses in the dark wearing friend is with her. She looks as superficial as Donna, checkered shoes, plastic butterfly hair clips.
Donna can talk all night.
Donna talks all night.
Her breasts seem to be pouring out of her shirt. No matter how intently I watch her mouth, all I see is her breasts talking. Her shirt is striped, low-cut spandex. I have no idea why I’m so intrigued by her clothing. I suppose it’s because I can tell her personality through them. How I know that if she’s involved in a conversation in less than a minute it will be about her drug experiences, and how stupid anyone who’s still on drugs is. She emphasizes how “bad” she had it, nonchalantly, as to denote it’s something everyone goes through.
I feel sick. I tell Harris I have to go home.

Promiscuity is just the desire to fill an insatiable need. How can you value what you have if there’s a lack of something there? Why debase the act to rid ourselves of who we wish it could be with.

I didn’t think Alberto could come out at night. He has no expression on his face; his garnet scales glisten in the moonlight. I’m afraid to close my eyes in fear that if I open them he’ll be gone. If I could, I’d be imagining myself ascending his back, crawling onto the crown of his head. He shivers and his scales ripple. He snorts. I can almost see an expressionless, recumbent smile form across his lips.
I get up from bed and tiptoe towards the window. Despite his size, I have the feeling that I’m capable of scaring him away. He grunts, and rolls his head, causing his scales to ripple again. I giggle, involuntarily putting my hand over my mouth.
His body is as vast as a landscape; nuanced and alluringly worn. And he’s handsome. A dragon, handsome, which causes me to giggle again. I sound like my mother watching the Discovery channel.
I tap on the window, trying to draw his attention. He swishes his tail, somehow not knocking it into anything.
“Pssst! Hey, you!” No response. “Psssssssst!”
I start giggling again, and crawl back into bed, lightened.

On the way back from the city the next day, I see the boy on the bus again. I want to talk to him. There’s that woman again too, holding his wheel chair. It rattles in the center of the aisle, politely annoying the passenger in the seat next to it. I think about getting up and sitting in the seat behind his. That would be too conspicuous – if he got off at my stop I would wait until he got off the bus to approach him, but he gets off later.
I have the urge to stay on the bus to see where he gets off. The neighborhoods this bus goes through become increasingly depraved on its route – hopefully it’ll be round trip. I’ve stayed on once before until the last stop and was kicked off into a ghetto. There were crazed old babushkas hassling me to get into their cars, offering to drive me home, their faces wrinkled into colorless prunes. All the men on the street were over six feet tall and wore clothes that looked like they had been washed in the gutter. I was scared, but finally the bus driver came back for me and drove me home. I tipped him ten dollars but he was still pissed off as hell, telling me to shut up and throwing his hands in the air. I didn’t mind. It was better than being stuck where I was.
The bus comes to my stop, and I stay on.
My phone starts ringing. Nine out of ten times it’s my mother. The woman holding the wheel chair glances back at me, probably thinking about how our society has been mangled by cell phones. It’s a girl I’ve talked to twice before in my life, met at a “get together” at her house in the middle of the summer, one of the only nights I went out. She complains to me about how she picks fights with her bipolar ex-boyfriend and some of things that he says as the result of this. I side with her to get her off the phone as quickly as possible, trying to talk as softly so that I can avoid the chiding glances of the woman. I begin to wonder if the reason she hates me talking on the cell phone is because the boy she’s taking care of can’t.
There’s a red stripe on the ceiling. The windows all have initials and hearts scratched into them. In some of the windows, it’s difficult to see outside. Most of the people that are still on the bus after this long are the Hispanic men that landscape off the books. In the morning, there’s an entire block full of them, waiting for a pick-up trucks to drive by so they can bum a ride.
The center aisle is identical to the black gristle that’s on every other kind of public bus. I remember being younger and wanting to sit on it, to stare at the gum stuck beneath the seats.
We pass through towns with forests full of Christmas trees, the Garden State mall. The people that wait at the bus stops all look the same. Why drug dealers dress the way they do when it’s so easy to spot them out is a mystery to me. I guess I’m only focusing on it because of my age.
I always thought there were three levels of being overweight. Fat, obese, and corpulent. The last being the man who’s getting on the bus and has to pay twice the fair because he takes up two seats. He’s got a forty ounce stuffed into a brown bag. It takes him nearly a minute to settle into the pair of seats across from mine. Once he does, he opens the beer (with his hands) and nearly chugs half of it.
A tiny, hot-tempered romantic gets on. She’s screaming at her boyfriend, who from the exaggerated precision in his movements, is a lush. When she holds her breath in, her nostrils flare. I start giggling by accident and she threateningly glares at me, reminding me of what Alberto might look like if he was about to belch fire. I can feel the dead passion lumbering between them, a dead limb.
She screams herself off the bus at the next stop. Flailing her arms in the air, she has a remarkable resemblance to a chicken with its head cut off. The boyfriend doesn’t follow. He doesn’t move.
The man who’s taken up the pair of seats next to me chuckles. His entire body undulates. He begins to laugh so hard amid slurping beer that I laugh with him. He’s repulsively hilarious. From the way he laughs, I think he must view himself as some kind of human parody. “Not very sober at all but far too close to it.” This he cheers to me, and I smile in return, grabbing my shoulders. It’s something my brother would say.
Two stops later the woman escorts the boy slowly off the bus. She grabs his wheel chair, coaxes him into it, and pushes him to the entrance, where the driver has converted the steps into a ramp. The boy is terrified of us watching him. I decide not to follow him off.
I name the corpulent beast next to me, Babsy. I think if anyone was ever named Babsy it would be him. It’s fitting.
The driver is heading back to the city after he makes his round and I pay another five dollars to stay on. Babsy is so drunk that he does too, getting out what must be his third forty.

When I get off it’s nine o’clock already. I must’ve been on the bus for over three hours. The skaters are probably still at the community center, but it’s at least a mile from here and I have the feeling that it’s going to rain soon. An Asian group passes me, talking with their hands.
“Does the machine like to be with them?”
I turn around, trying to find the voice that asked the question. There being nobody around, it must have been one of the Asians. It didn’t sound like an Asian voice, though, and being thoroughly spooked out I start heading home. In the other direction there’s a McDonald’s and a Burger King across the street from each other.
I watch the Asian group walk off into the distance. Tomorrow is Sunday. I’ll know tomorrow is Sunday because of the amount of cars passing the bridge, the quietness of the air, the emptiness of the streets.
I’m so confused.

Things have happened to me. Events that I treasured, moments that I noticed every detail of in hopes that I would remember them. But why remember? To retell? To whom? I can’t directly recreate the experience that I went through for someone else; they need to fully experience it themselves to feel the way I did. And in purposely trying to notice everything so that one can remember, it takes away from the actual experience of living. I relinquished the moment as if I were remembering it later, while it actually happened.
These events that have happened to me in the past, if they do not effect the mood I’m in now, did they need to have happened? If I...devised a memory that never happened but I somehow manage to truly believe that it did, wouldn’t it have the same effect on me as something that really has happened?
It is in this way that I doubt my own reality. Life is just a hodgepodge of events and fortuities, and love a clumsy befuddling of limbs. All I can remember about the relationships I’ve been in are mouths opening to speak, of leaves falling, of eyes, and desperate attempts to experience all of someone knowing that they won’t always be there. There are no faces, no feelings but nostalgia, in which I try to grasp at every memory I have as to not forget them. But I do, trying to remember so hard that the memories become nothing but checkmarks.
What is the point to having felt anything at all if I can’t keep it there. To experience the pain of missing it when it’s gone? How can happiness be real when I feel it knowing I can change the way I feel just by thinking.
It’s times like this where when I bend my knees, move my lips, or engage in anything corporeal, that I feel as if my body is a casket in which my thoughts are locked inside. That if my body were to be broken open, my thoughts would leak out, no longer confined to the barren view of my eyes. They would become a part of everything, diffusing into every object, moment and breath.
When I don’t feel like I’m there, I talk too much, and stare distantly.
I don’t.

Someone left a Webster’s dictionary in the refusal chute room. It weighed a ton and left me panting afterwards, but I managed to drag it home.
I’ve been so disoriented. After I returned from the bus detour I drifted around the house in lassitude for hours. I stared at the moving shapes on TV but made no sense of them. Gave Harris a call, didn’t pick up. I thought about David, cajoling his girlfriend into love with him.
I waited by the window in my room, hoping for an appearance by Alberto.
I call Harris again. He picks up. He lives in the apartment downstairs, so I grab my keys and meet him in the stairwell out in the hallway. We chat for a bit, smoke a couple cigarettes, then go into his apartment. His room looks like graffiti. There’s not actually any graffiti in it, it just reminds me of it. There’s a green lava lamp, posters of bands he doesn’t listen to, games he doesn’t play, and Kurt Cobain, his idol. There’s a cheap mirror positioned to make everyone that looks in it look attractive. His carpet has cigarette stains all over it, pizza stains, lipstick smudges. He’s broken his window so if he ever feels like it he can jump out.
“Hey. Hey.”
“Yo. Pass the clicker. It’s on the floor.”
I do.
“Okay, go to channel a thousand, order a movie. How long are you staying?”
“It doesn’t matter. As long as you amuse me.”
“Wow,” he says to his computer. “Kinky.”
“Catty.”
“Mrow.” He raises his hands in the air, imitating claws. “I wish there were pharmaceutical bars. Don’t you? I do. Pharmaceutical bars.”
“Where they sold pills?”
“Sure. Of all kinds. Everything you could ever imagine.” He has some kind of hastened drawl of an accent, and becomes absorbed with everything he says, playing with his voice. “In one corner…” He goes on. I curl up into his bed. The next couple years of my life could be like this if I don’t do something about it. Not that this is bad – doing absolutely nothing. I always forget that in commenting about my brother not going to school it seems like that I do. I don’t. I dropped out just like he did.
Where is he?
He hasn’t been home in days. “…and the bar tender is one of those pop’em pill containers, with rubbery arms and legs…” We don’t interact much but the lack of his presence causes me to feel insecure, and the ruthless inattention my mother gives him affects me, too. She tries as hard as she can to pretend like she doesn’t care, tapping her chest, drinking red wine. Can’t help that her son’s chosen to become a drug addict, she’s tried everything she can. It’s his father’s fault, darling.
If someone wrote one of those American family tragedies centered around us it would be a smash hit on Broadway.
Harris is still talking, playing with his Adderall. When I hear the sound of him snorting something, I sit up, startled. He rolls his head back, putting his thumb under his nose and closing his eyes. I slam my head back into his pillows. His ceiling is exactly like mine. He loafs over to me, an exaggerated smile on his face.
“Oh, Harris.” I roll over, making sure his guard is down, then smack him in the face with a pillow.
We lie together in silence. There’s tension, at least coming from my end. The last time I’ve lied on the same bed as a boy, let alone anyone at all – it’s been awhile. I know he won’t initiate anything. I trust him enough to lie next to him. I’m not sure what I would do if he kissed me–
“What the fuck?”
I sit up on my elbows. “What?” He’s staring out the window, slowly getting up.
“What the fuck…is that.”
I laugh hysterically, blushing like mad. I rush over to his broken window and open it so that it rams into the other end, leaning my entire body out.
Alberto, hovering lifelessly as usual. I can’t see his face this time, as he’s faced in the other direction, but I get a magnificent view of his colossal reddish-gray legs, and proof that dragons do indeed have buttocks.
I try to reach him, yelling out to Harris to make sure I don’t fall out. He doesn’t respond.
I must look like a ghost, my shirt billowing in the wind, my hair a blond static ball. I stretch as far as I can but I can’t reach him. I draw back, out of breath. I look at Harris, who’s in stupor, and crack up, pointing at the look on his face. He shakes his head back and forth, in slow-mo.
“It’s okay dude. You’re not going to believe this but I thought I was the only one who could see him. He’s a dragon, I think. Every time I lie in bed and get lost in thought he appears.”
I hug him. When I turn around, Alberto’s gone.

“You named him…Alberto.”
Laughing, “Yes.”
“…What the fuck kind of name for a dragon is Alberto?”
“I don’t know, it seemed fitting. It was the first thing that came to mind.”
“What the fuck kind of name is Alberto in general? I mean, who the fuck even names their kids Alberto. It’s a fucking dragon, he needs a…dragon-deserving name.”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
“Give me a sec, I’m thinking about it.”
We snap at each other like this for an hour or so, dizzy and excited, until his speed kicks in and I become uncomfortable being around him. I want to stay to make sure he’s okay and hold him when he comes off, but that’ll be sometime in the morning. His stiff, over-stimulated speech and constant pacing is unnerving. I tell him I have to go, and even though he fidgets and begs me to stay I tell him my mom needs me home earlier tonight, clasping his hands goodbye and quietly escaping.

Upstairs, I see Alberto outside my window again. There’s something wrong. His wings sag, and the deep hue of his scales has lost their resplendence. I make motions with my mouth, twitching my eyebrows in his pain. There’s something very wrong. I don’t know what this flying creature outside of my window is and why I can rarely ever see it but it’s become one of the reasons I get up in the morning. The hope he gives me is similar to that of being contacted by a loved ex, or something much more profound than that, I’d try and specify but I can’t really think of anything right now. Looking more closely I can see these veiny black webs hanging from beneath his wings. His face is still turned away from me, but I’d imagine even if he was in pain he would remain expressionless. There’s a crack in one of his wings and his skin has developed a livid pallor. I press my hands up against my window. He sinks his immensely long and slender neck, causing the spikes from his shoulders to jut out.
I think about calling out to him, Alberto, but that’s obviously not his name and I’d end up waking my mother. The last thing she needs right now is to see me talking to myself. He wouldn’t be able to hear me, either. His legs just hang there. He looks almost like a bored dog, floating in mid-air. Does he have some kind of disease? There’s no way he could have gotten a crack like that in one of his wings from one of the buildings around here. Does he go somewhere else once he’s departed from this world? From my world?
It feels like I’m finishing the story I never started a long time ago. Does that make any sense? I suppose none of this makes sense. I just wish for once I could express how dire this is. This circumstance. The circumstance. I’m trying to, round my arms, circle them – form a circle with them – I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m standing here watching a dragon outside of my window. It doesn’t do anything, it just floats there. Alberto, though. I’m trying to form a circle with my arms and hopes that I can fix something with it, or that I can fit something into it. If I can, fit something into it, if my arms are wide enough to – I don’t know. I don’t know.
I get on my knees, circling my arms over my head. I don’t know what I’m doing but can’t write because of the dazed phased glow. When I stand up Alberto’s gone. Vanished.

I’m on the couch with mom again. Waiting for a Chinese food delivery. She’s watching a movie that Harrison Ford flopped in. She thinks he’s handsome, I can tell. She’s holding a glass of wine in her hand like the goblet of eternal life. Always talks about her parents being alcoholics. How she grew up in poverty and witnessed her mother have a stroke sitting down at the dining room table. She’s already lived longer than her mother did. If I complain about anything she’ll begin to lecture me about how she had to steal food from basements, her stay at the orphanage with her three sisters, how one of them would always piss the bed. Her uncle raped her. It seems like all the wealthier older women she’s friends with have been raped too. They cross their legs and have these “workshops”, where they share everything about each other and hum loudly.
Brother came home last night. He didn’t even look at us, just opened the door and slouched into his room. His hair looked like he had been sleeping on it for a couple days. Chugging Robitussin, shooting heroin, probably even smoking meth, I wouldn’t put him past it. I’ve seen him come out of the shower with tracks running down his left arm like rows of little dark suns. I don’t even know what he does anymore.
When we were younger we used to play rummie in the attic together, and at Christmas he always made sure my presents were opened first. When I went into the ninth grade he’d pick me up from school. He showed me how to roll a joint, unplug the toilet, make the dishes appear like they were washed without washing them. How to tell when mom was lying. He’d pass the football with me, back when we had a country house. We’d run around the house, screaming at the top of our lungs, playing hide and seek until he’d come up from behind me and pick me up and toss me in the air. I’d ride on his shoulders in town. In the spring we’d paint the house together, and I’d get it all over myself, and he’d throw it into my hair and I’d pour an entire bucket on him and we’d make the deck a mess, which drove mom nuts, so we had to recoat that and then do the walls again because we splattered the black all over the place. I remember being at the beach with him and watching him stand up to the waves with his best friends. And the nightmares from the scary movies he’d rent, he’d sit by bed until I fell asleep. I think he put sleeping pills into the glass of water I’d ask for. He wouldn’t let me go anywhere without him. And even when he started doing drugs, or I assumed he did, and started hanging out with the other boys in his grade and the fucked up drop-outs that peruse the outside of the school looking to score, he’d still always call me, pick up the phone if I called and I needed him to bail me out. He wouldn’t ask me where I’d gone or what I’d done or who I’d been with, he’d just look at me pleadingly in the passenger’s seat and I’d break down. Back when we had a car.
“Oh, shit.” Mother spills.

I had an ominous suspicion that if I were to see Alberto again it would be the last time I saw him. I knew I’d see him again, somehow. I didn’t try to hasten the process by hanging out in bed or staring out the window any more than I normally would. I didn’t want to pressure him. I hung out with Harris more, watched him take a bat to the ceiling to kill a fly. For a week or so there wasn’t a second or so I was without him, except when he was in school. I’d pick him up after his last class, along with the others, and we’d go to the community center, taking breaks to loiter and tip things over on the way.
I tried as best I could not to seem like anything was wrong, which I’m sure made me stick out like a sore thumb. I started dressing more femininely, wearing bolder bras and translucent blouses, the ruffled kinds that always get guys going. I don’t know what I did that for. They’d tease me, accuse me of having a crush on them all.
Eventually they started looking at me differently, acting more awkward, reserved. A couple of them, including David, even started to ignore me. Harris was the only one who didn’t change his stature. Soon after I gave it up, went back to wearing shirts two sizes too big for me and going over twenty-four hours without washing my hair. Everything reverted to normal. I think they saw me as intruding when I tried to act like an actual girl, and started treating like me one in return. I don’t think I could ever stand that.
As the weeks went by, I nearly forgot about Alberto. Harris never mentioned him. The only time I ever brought it up he said we were probably hallucinating, or that there must have been something in the speed. He even went as far to say that it never happened at all. Maybe it didn’t; there was no way that I could prove that it did.
I felt that I had untapped a dormant zest for life, or something that temporarily rid me of the introspection I once put myself through. Brother began to hang less and less at home, until he just stopped coming back altogether. I tried to ask some of his friends where he had gone but they didn’t even know. He’d stopped talking to most of them. They even tried to hit on me, now that he was gone.
Mom stopped drinking as heavily at the expense of her never being around. When I did manage to talk to her she would only talk about how she had lifted a great burden off of her back, and was feeling restored. She began to gasp even more on the phone with her friends, which I never thought possible. She was out every night with them, and during the day she went to classes.
I stopped hanging around home as much, too. It felt oppressing being there with the entire family gone, and I secretly languished for it to return to the way it was, no matter how dysfunctional. Harris forced me to study for my GED, and even signed me up for the SATS in October. On the nights he didn’t have as much homework (he rarely did it anyway) he helped me study, holding up index cards and timing me on practice tests.

And then Alberto appeared. I was staring at the ceiling in the dark when I heard a deafening screeching sound. I nearly screamed, toppling out of bed and taking half of it with me. I looked up from the floor and saw him nudging his nose against the glass. It left a load of dragon snot, which blocked my view of everything but his eye. I rushed over to the window, tripping over myself, and opened it as far as it would go. I had nothing to rip open the screen with. He grunted, as if to say that this was okay.
His eye had splotches of blood in it, like ink in water. When he blinked it nearly knocked me over. I smiled, flinging myself up against the glass and trying to support my knees on the sill. I wanted to be as close to him as possible. I still had no idea what his purpose was, if my eyes were playing tricks on me or if this was some kind of illusion, an actual hallucination, proof that I was truly losing it. The skin around his eye was frail, speckled with black moles. I was afraid to see the rest of him. He breathed hoarsely, and even though it was evident that he was dying, there was still something majestic about his presence. There was no fear in his eyes, or self-pity, or anything of that sort. I felt the inexplicable urge to give my life to him, hoping that in some way it would save him, or keep him alive long enough to find a cure.
He blinked one last time, indicating what I assumed as goodbye, and lowered his head. When I looked down into the courtyard of the building, there was nothing there except the milkshake that Harris had thrown out the window earlier.

At my brother’s funeral, my mother wouldn’t stop tapping her chest. It became so loud that the orator paused during his speech. She seemed to be pounding at her heart, trying to remove something much darker than I would ever be able to comprehend.