Running out of streets

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I was told that I was unbearable in my early twenties. That was the time that I was going around reading all the big, old books. Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and Alighieri and all them European ancients that sounded as if the very syllables of their names farts philosophy. I was really into being smarter than other people at that time, kicking around in my skulls a kind of score card that keeps tabs of wins and losses whenever I entered into word-jousting with the people that I was hanging around with.

Dropping quotes like birds pooping from a great height in the middle of conversations. No one was safe from me. Some of the younger ones thought I was radical though if I was honest, and I was never honest. Those people probably existed only in my head. Lost more friends than I could count in those days.

The quotes stayed with me, though. How about that.

Kid texted me though we lived in the same city.

"Do you remember what you thought about exactly at this time last week?"

She was sometimes a sneaky little shit. I probably had said something that she had thought I would regret later on and she had memorized the occasion for a comeuppance moment, akin to priming a landmine in the land of the dark that spanned across the entire future conversations that she and I would have. I didn't text back.

I thought about those existential quotes dancing around in my head in a whirlwind as I walked from street to street. Sometimes I was walking from street to street when I had nothing better to do except walking from street to street, and this was me now, which was fine, because I had friends in my head going on at a hundred miles an hour back and forth with their big quotes at each other, going street to street.

The truth was that I couldn't ignore that brat and I had texted her back within one minute.

"Why did you buy that bike? You would never use it."

Maybe I was unbearable when I was her age, but if you'd ask me, I'd say that she took that game to a whole other level. Which was impressive, it really was. I had to give it to her, because someone who had played that whole business with the score card in your head would recognize one another and I was a grizzled war veteran at this but I had had years to descend into the vortex. And the kid, she was a natural born anarchist.

She replied swiftly. I could almost hear the sound of her grinning.

"To regret it."

At some point in those nights where you walked from street to street, you'd actually run out of streets. Trust me. Those of you who had walked that walk would know this. They'd tell you what I just did, man. You'd come to a corner and you'd realize that you had run out of streets.

I was about to run out of streets when I saw someone I knew from back when. He saw me as sure as water was wet and I could tell that he had known instantly who I was and he pushed his face to a place of arrangement. A veil came over his skin, which was freaky as hell, but then again I thought the same thing was happening on my face. He walked towards me and I turned sideways to cross the road though I had no need to fucking cross the road. I felt him walked behind me and I crossed the fucking road.

Look, sometimes you just have to do things because other things were already in motion from years and years ago. They said a few things were already in motion from hundreds of years ago. I crossed the road I didn't need to cross and turned towards home.

"I was an asshole last week, kid. I gave you shit for nothing."

She didn't reply this time but I felt a notch drawn on the page of the score card that she kept in her head. Her points were through the roof, nothing but vindication trophies that stretched upwards towards the height of infinity point. The kid had points to make, but listen, she wasn't a bad kid, alright? For one, she was always there for me when I had no one else to turn to. And I had put her through some really shitty situations, all right. Others had left, put the veil up, walked away. The kid, though, she was still here giving me attitude about my being an asshole last week.

Maybe she thought I'd get out of the vortex somehow, clawing inch by inch with my own hands. Maybe it wasn't a stretch of dark lands peppered by land mines but a climb out of the cave in which the coward in you lived and thrived inside of you.

Must be a fucking deep cave.

I reached home in the dead hours between two and three in the morning. A cat moved soundlessly at the alley nearby and it stopped to look at me. I waved at it.

"Ran out of streets, I found my way back home."

It turned around and sat to look at the moon. I looked at the moon with it for a while. A giant mirror, it was looking back at me with its shining face. A permanent veil. Maybe that was what death really was. When you put it up for the final time, you wouldn't recognize any one ever again.

I smiled.

Maybe there were no score cards. No wins or losses.

Just streets to be walked, and lonely, lonely hearts that bruise easily.