12
I’ve thought about this
event, didn’t know how to
write it or what it meant.
he must have come home
with me…maybe I offered
him the couch? but I woke
on the couch and he
was at the round
table by the window
with the view onto the
bottle shop and car dealers
at the intersection
and I pretended to be asleep.
maybe it was the come down
from whatever
we’d been taking but I
couldn’t bare looking or
talking to another person
so I stayed put
on the couch and kept my
eyes shut, slept,
woke, slept for 24 hours
and he was still there
at the table
the next day. I had to
piss so I had to get
up and he was like wow
man, in a Greek accent, you
were out to it for 24 hours
and I made him coffee
and breakfast and we talked
and he told me about Greece
and I was thinking why did
I lose 24 hours with this guy
for, he’s okay? he was flying
out of the country that
day and I couldn’t give him
a lift because I didn’t have
a car, and he waved, crossing the
road in the large new
summer light on everything,
turned smiling back at me
at the window, as I watched,
strange with the forced extra
sleep, his backpack and black hair
blend into the everything else.
Whatever happened, I enjoyed the brief if strange human meeting and departure into that sun and distant Greece! That ‘large new summer light’ is intensely evocative to me of Australia (if it did happen there…)
It was maybe 20 years ago but it feels so recent. hopefully arriving at a poem from it will close it
i know that feeling of not wanting to confront the person you’ve spent all night with getting high or drunk. had this vague feeling of regret, or something