Around The Way

Randy Rudolf walked past my house as I was sitting on my stoop. It had been a long afternoon and the hazy sun fell across my pale face in sharp angles. I'd fallen asleep at a little past four in the morning, had gotten up two hours later, and kept on falling prey to periods of productivity before succumbing once again to slumber. Each burst of activity punctuated the subsequent power nap like italicized exclamation points: Another doze!

I was getting really tired of the twitch surrounding my right eye. The frustration welling in my chest burned like I ate some bad sushi. And man, if you had seen the pile of bills collecting on my dresser, you'd understand.

On the plus side, though, I was looking good. Hard times brought out my hard eyes, my high cheek bones, my try-your-luck-strut. I'd perfected the hoodrat glare of seasoned sexual experience, and could shoot a salty stare farther than you can spit. Maybe that's why Randy Rudolf smiled at me as he walked home. He knew that look on my face, knew what I was capable of when I glared at guys like I had game for miles, knew that a perverse mania swept my psyche every time my eyes shone like pearls.

"You know you can get a ticket for that," Randy Rudolf said as he motioned to the beer bottle in my hand. He pecked me on the cheek - a greeting and acknowledgment of our shared history.

I took another swig of my Heineken and laughed. "At this point, I couldn't care less," I said with a shrug.

We lowered our stares and directed our attention to the street, where a blue and white was rolling. Cops were patrolling our block a lot, and even though I was no longer involved in the hijinx of the neighborhood low-lifes, I couldn't help but fall back into my old self. No matter how law-abiding I am, I will never trust police.

Randy Rudolf swept his gaze back at me after the blue and white had drifted from sight. He seemed to be thinking over my last words, sizing up my answer; I simultaneously searched it for truth.

It's been a long time since I ran numbers around my way, whistled high to announce the arrival of squadron cars, fucked with the dudes in the corner house. - (To my credit, I hadn't allowed myself to stoop to the level of ho or trick; I'd fuck with the dudes, but I laughed at the idea of fucking them.) - Now, years after I'd snuck out of my parents' house to partake in tasteless talk about taboos, it all feels surreal.

I am not the same girl who wore puffy princess dresses in elementary school. Nor am I the wide-eyed and wild-limbed pre-adolescent who, suffering from insomnia, took it upon herself to wander the streets at night. I am not the girl who, at the age of fifteen, got stabbed in the leg with a steak knife and bandaged the cut by herself. I am not the girl who, at the age of sixteen, moved to Virginia with her brother and attended class with the attorney general's son. I'm sure as hell not the same girl who moved in with a suit at the age of seventeen, and thought I could handle it because he wasn't my first love, my first fuck, my first live-in relationship.

I am not the same person who deemed it excusable to print my close friend's sex life in a blog, under the guise of art. I am not the same person who cut ties with her childhood best friends because she didn't know how to continue being someone's best friend. I am not the same person who smoked up daily, got drunk daily, snuck into bars, fucked voraciously, loved shallowly, befriended anonymously, partied haphazardly, nearly fucked up everything because of Daddy Issues, Mommy Issues, abuse, fear, quarterlife crisis, pressure, hubris, stupidity, just to feel what it's like to hit rock bottom.

I am not that person.

So when Randy Rudolf stared at me with those dark glittering eyes of his, while flipping in his head my words - "At this point, I couldn't care less" - and sizing me up, I didn't know how I was feeling. In the context of the other Marias - the unsure ones, the inexperienced ones, the less intelligent ones, the luckier ones, the rough-and-tumble ones, the scholarly ones, the jaded ones, et al. - I knew how to size up who I was. The contexts had been used before, in classic stories, beloved movies, old time songs. I knew the roles, knew the stereotypes, cast myself in each shadow before learning how to shine.

But at that very moment, with a remnant of my past staring me in the face, I realized that I was something, someone entirely different from anything I'd ever imagined or come across.

Somehow, in between all of the introverted introspectiveness and wild extroverted perversities, I'd come into my own skin. I didn't know yet what that skin was made of, which parts of which Marias had remained, but I knew that I was more or less fully formed, and I really couldn't care less what life had to throw at me. I was gonna be okay.

Randy Rudolf smiled at me, and at once his face was kind, mischievous, and fatherly. "You did good, kid," he said.

Other Marias would've beamed, but I earnesly nodded my head in agreement. "I know," I said as I put down my beer and picked up my journal and a pen. "Man, do I know..."