SHE WAIT

I picked her up at the front of the high school Saturday night. A glass box of plastic gold, white and grey swirled granite---a bastion of school pride---stood behind her. She sat upon a folding table, waiting for me, kicking her feet in a walking airborne rhythm. Long, curled strands of mahogany clasped naivety. We were to go out and see, each by their own, if anything fond could strike. She was pretentiously captivated in me by sight, by cherry-picking me from a crowd the week before. She was all in.

She looked at me like I was a god. And to her perhaps I was---the one to deliver her from parental constraints to my constraints in a new domestic world. It was in her smile, that smile, a young happiness that shadowed judgement. Judgement that lived in moment and young aesthetic which existed in a world turned by hindsight/foresight and old, old logic. She was lost.

It was in her eyes: Glass and sparks like a bottle rocket fixed at target not knowing that it would eventually explode, finishing in spectacular burst of spark, fire, red paper and heaped disenchantment. To her nothing could end like this.

The limestone lane met the lawn. Dusk rose, infused its rusty sky into an evening black. Only the equinox could cast a harvest shadow to make the blackest silhouettes of corn tassels, like an army of dead, dry soldiers waiting to be cut down. I was eighteen. It was the last semester. She wait like the rest of the world, stopped dead and black with yellow and violet dots swarming like fireflies off in a void. She wanted a kiss but I was gone.