Second person flash fiction about people who aren’t you and probably couldn’t be, given the nature of fiction.

TRUTH BE TOLD, THESE ARE KIND OF SHITTY.








You go looking for an explanation of how the world works, which takes you to college, New Mexico, University of. You like the heat and the adobe buildings, the indigenous feel of the desert, too. You start classes. You get a handle on things. You go to a party, drink a beer, see a girl, and the world no longer works, or at least you don’t. You traipse around her, hovering but at a significant enough distance not to be too creepy. You approach. You speak. You fall further, and further. That was sometime ago. These days you wake up at four in the morning because your prostrate is enlarged, and you do your damnedest not to disturb her sleep when you crawl back into bed. You have not forgotten that you wanted to see underlying logic beneath the scrum of seeming happenstance that presents itself as life’s hand in reality’s glove, but not seeing anything much like that no longer leaves you feeling wanting.



You go looking for an ethics of human relations, which search is part of a reaction formation to being the youngest sister in a family populated by loud, athletic, vindictive brothers who would alternately shield you from life and smash your face into its firmament. You leave town at eighteen and head to Madison, Wisconsin, where you gain an appreciation for beer as breakfast and atonal music. Your forays into relationships, love, and sex yield little in the way of answers about how humans ought to relate to one another, but the triangulating experience did make you caustically averse to believing what they would tell you even if you knew that they believed in what they said. You begin to accept that you find strength and sense in being apart from other people. Time passes. Your brothers get married, have babies, make you a godmother. You, for your part, open a consulting business and become a name people nod to in response when it is uttered down in the capitol building. You are still looking.



You go looking for a sound or series of sounds that can sustain the energy you first felt in the basement of the Elks Lodge when four sixteen year olds set up a drum set, plugged their amps in, and rocked your shit until you thought maybe your heart would exit your sternum and fall squishily to the floor from the sheer palpating heartfuck of it all. First you look in record stores and the messages left on flyers posted to pawn shop windows, hang out in dark smoky rooms to watch trios try a Miles Davis routine, then watch fluid movements and foot tapping in concert halls full of professional looking people who take life seriously. You went down to the Delta and came across failed prophets whose failure was more successful than anything you’ve ever done. I don’t know what you are anymore – an avatar of variance, perhaps, with a paunch and a destructive appetite for excess - but I can still see it in your eyes when someone takes the stage, that hopeful expectation, and maybe that’s all it takes, and all it gives, anymore.