Who We Choose To Be

He brought the cigarette up to his lips. Du Maurier, king size. Squinting, he blew the smoke rings over her outstretched fingers. She hated the fact that he smoked but it was all about picking her battles. Yeah, he was 5 inches shorter than her, but it was kind of hot. Turned her on. Guys would hit on her when they walked down the street together, oblivious to the fact that his hand was entwined with hers. His biker boots gave him an extra 2 inches but it was all the same laying down, nudge nudge, wink wink. They both had alcoholics in their midst. His father, the self-made entrepreneurial terminal disaster. Always moving on to the next big thing, always leaving everyone else behind. Her entire family was off the rails. They ran a grow op out of the basement where she played tennis against the unfinished concrete wall. Broke two of the fluorescent lights once, and panicked that she'd be grounded. They were still kids themselves, eighteen, nineteen. Every breath was all consuming. They created each other out of  impassioned ideas of who they wanted to be. Absolute manifest destiny, carved out of late night road trips crawling through basement windows at 3 am full of steamed hot dogs and french fries from Lafleurs. Promises of forever, proposals that challenged their convictions, tattoos, heartbreak, desolation and distance. But the shared creation of their identities- their coded shorthand and love of Charlie Parker, the two days in Svetlana's B and B subsisting off of Oreos, sex, poetry and Coca Cola,  getting loaded on vodka in his mother's basement and terrifying each other with the thought that maybe they were just like everyone else, those days defined them. It was never going to end well. Naive romanticism is always squandered on youth. She's long since outgrown her fascination with Kerouac and he left for New York City never to be heard from again. There was that time he showed up on her doorstep out of the blue on his way to teach ESL to Spanish farm workers with his guitar and trumpet in tow. And so it goes. And so it went.