short stories

"As I sat in a dark smokey bar last night, sipping Glogg and listening to the Smiths play from the Juke box in the corner, I couldn't help but let my mind drift to an old friend and wonder how he might be all these years later.

Carl was one of my few friends in high school, and possibly the only one I liked. he wrote poetry endlessly, played guitar in a prolific band, spoke of Keats like he was God, and worshipped Morissey. We were both wierd and awkward, but as I sat on the fringe of cool, too geeky to be accepted, he endeared himself to every social group in school, his own wierdness a charming novelty. Everyone wanted to know what Carl was listening to, what he was reading, what movies he was in to. He was our 'cool' thermometer, and for about a year in high school, in carl's mind, nothing was cooler than me.

It was my first taste of being a muse. Carl's poems were about me, his songs about me, his philosophy on love based on our relationship. And for the sake of Carl's art, it was absolutely essential that our relationship be kept as embiguous and vague as possible. If either one of us broke our unspoken rule and explicitly expressed our feelings, the spell would be broken and Carl might never write again. So I nursed crushes on other people, dated other guys, and Carl wrote tortured love songs and passed poems to me in class about the growing loss of youth and the torment of my "affairs." "I've met them there, " he wrote in one, "your mystery loves, in restless dreams. I've seen them before in your lovesick eyes."

I never spoke to him after graduation, but I kept all his letters and poems and mixed tapes. I don't know why. I suppose, buried somewhere in his all his romanticized seventeen-year-old trying and trying, are little kernels I recognized as truths. and besides that, when might I ever have anyone write to me again:

'I dreamt of you the other night
as a sphere of glowing light
with sedated lips, I pressed to kiss
the strangest twist upon your lips'

In the first week of April of our senior year, we took a class trip to London. I felt like exploring the city alone and so shrugged off any invitations to join classmates on jaunts around town. One afternoon, as I was walking around West End, looking for intersting people to have a drink with, I ran right into Carl stepping out of a Taco Bell.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm trying to find out where Morissey lives. Or even Robert Smith. If I can find one of them, then my trip will be complete."

"Right," I answered. "Maybe we should go get a drink."

We ducked into a pub and had pint after pint of beer, listening to The Smiths play from a juke box in a corner. We talked about writing and our futures and what we wanted to do with our lives. We talked about relationships and whether we'd ever find happiness in love. Carl suspected the day he'd find happiness is the day he'd stop writing. It was the unspoken understanding we shared, the tension that sat between us.

Now eleven years later, I wonder. what is he listening to? what is he reading? what movies does he watch? who's his muse now, and did he ever let love destroy him?"

-Wendy in the Windy City