Weather sweet like the tea melting the little half-formed iced cubes in my foam cup, just as sweet and just as heavy, sweet like the deep-fried corn on the cob at the gas station up the road, sweet like the bartenders and bank attendants and Waffle House woman with her missing teeth and her friendly advice that I didn’t ask for, me listening to it with relish anyways; sweet like her accent, dripping with that sluggish honey of a twang that comes from a lifetime of living slower than the rest of the united states and perhaps richer as a result, and me with my mild toothache, telling myself I don’t mind, tell me a bit more of your sucrose-coated advice, and while you’re at it dribble some more of that gritty syrup onto my buttermilk waffle. The check is on the corner. We both know neither of us cares if it should ever move from that spot as long as these sweet, sweet moments remain. You, the sweet stranger, and me and my northern ways, so affection and sweetness starved I could drink you and that bottle of syrup up in a heartbeat without satiation, and that’s just fine, we are who we are and we play the roles we only know how to play. You’ll be back here tomorrow, and what do you know, so will I.
Because I’m just a rambler and here’s where I’ve rambled, I hope that’s okay with you, that I stay a awhile, and soak in you and your kind for an hour or two. You’re so much different from up there, and while I still remain so alone separated from what’s up there and where I’m from, I still find that this middle ground, this sweet southern middle ground where the grits aren’t burnt and the help aren’t either is rather a nice place to be, when you don’t know which place you’re supposed to be. But look at me, I’m babbling again, and so I’m heading home now, I think, up the road to the place I lay my head
though if that’s all that constitutes a place being a home than l, I guess I, I don’t know anymore.
But here I go anyway, goodnight, and enjoy the tip, it was the best I could do, and God as my witness if I could give you a bigger tip for talking to a lonely northern girl seeking sweetness on a hot Tennessee night, man…… I would go broke, and that would be fine with me. You can tell I would, and that’s enough to get me up the half mile up the road to what we call home, what I call something like that, but I digress.
People ask me to write, write, but what they don’t understand is I don’t write so much as I babble, scream, cry, melt, smell and taste the human condition to the best of my abilities and when I’m done I take my findings and hold them inside myself and then hug them into a sheet of paper, over and over and over again, and if that’s writing, naw, I’d disagree. I am not an author. I am a vagabond, and I just want to feel enough each day to go home to my piece of paper at night and hug a story into it, because it’s the best I can do, really. I think somewhere in this, there’s something to do with love, though I haven’t figured that out yet, but I’m still searching, and when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll do it all over again.
And here I am, home or something like it, on my stoop.
Humidity like walking through a thick stew, and bugs as large as loaves of bread waddling across my foot. Hello, Summer in the South. You’re a spongy sort of bitch, and me in my boxers perched precariously on my lawn chair hoping whatever large furry thing that’s rearranging some trees in the woods to my left doesn’t get a hankering for northern cuisine. I can see now why everybody owns guns down here. Yipe.
I’d be lying though, if I said I didn’t love the humidity just a little bit, that thick wooly veil that drapes on our sticky-hot shoulders like Armour, and burdens and loves us just the same, and every sweaty hot second I spend being caressed by that weather, I feel, just a teensy bit, apart of something, maybe not bigger, but definitely more snugger, like the link in a crocheted blanket keeping the whole world from unraveling, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love playing that small, small role in this smaller southern town, because even if nobody’s noticed me yet, it still means I’m here, and the sweetness of the air took note of me long enough to wave me into her atmosphere as she was passing by.
And that’s almost enough like being loved that I can go to sleep to my smell of syrup and sweat, and find connection in it. Almost enough. Just almost enough.
YOU ARE READING
