Monday, May 12, 2003
And every picture has a middle.I might have been living in a mold-infested dorm room, decorated only with a "Kurt Vonnegut in the U.C. Auditorium" poster, but it still had a certain charm. Mailboxes that never opened, a front door that you could only get into if God himself assisted you in swiping your ID card, a lobby lacking in both a television and friendly people. But, on a positive note, the front steps offered a view down the street toward the EPA, with it's tiny reflecting pool, down towards all the buildings of government finance. And I could sit on those steps without really getting in anyone's way and watch the people come and go.
And so I sat that day, on those almost wide steps, pretending to read the Metro section of the twenty-five cent Post, waiting for him to walk up after zigzagging down the street to avoid construction fences, cranes, and homeless people. And eventually he did show up, looking like he hadn't brushed his hair in a week and like he'd never seen an iron in his lifetime, smiling that same smile that had gotten me in trouble a couple of nights before. I wish I could say what we said on those steps. That conversation has faded away like so many others before and since. But let it suffice to say that I knew I was going to follow him and that somehow I knew this was the ending of something rather than the beginning.
We walked back to the Metro, talking about work and what our other friends were doing and what they would think if they spotted us together. We took the Green Line all the way to Fort Totten talking more about the people around us than what was going on between us. We walked to his car, past the "Kiss and Ride," and drove to his house in what I then called the ghetto, what I would now call the quaintly forgotten and unfortunately gang-ridden.
He had two roommates (one shirtless and Italian and the other middle-aged and vaguely pschyzophrenic), a matress on the floor, stacks of CDs that must have taken up at least half of the space he had in his car when he moved, and letters all over the floor around his unmade bed from the girlfriend back home, decorated with doodles and colored pens and metallic stick-on stars.
Heather at 4:35 PM
