"nothing feels good like you in your red and blue jeans"
"You're so hardcore."
Quiet guys with wistful eyes and jet hair.
Soft-faced under striped scarves, layered in introspection, immortalised in patchworks of flannel.
Gazing through thick-rimmed glasses, heavy-set,
sending the condolences of the counterculture.
Good on drums, better with a pen, with a nice voice that he hates to hear.
There is no unique mystique found in this.
It is a tapestry of garage bands, flat-iron burns, and long mornings in the lonesome Midwest.
I never met my first boyfriend's parents.
I heard that they had buried their first daughter,
and that they had no son.
It was the past or himself, so he killed the past.
Now he lives in the present like a new apartment, incomplete, half-decorated.
Moving day.
His eyes are smudged with black, half eyeliner, half remnants of the lying awake.
He'd lay in bed 'til he crumbled to dust, save the fact that hair dye doesn't tend to decompose.
He is twice the man he ever was and half the man he'll never be, he tells me.
His voice is quiet, raspy, low.
The straight-A Southern belle gave it up for lukewarm cola
and emotional hardcore in the heart of Somewhere, Nowhere.
He cut his hair with a pocket knife in the kitchen sink of
the first roommate to give him his last black eye.
Now he doesn't need the makeup.
He tells me, "pick a direction."
And we start driving.
He tells me everything as the fields and hills roll by and blur into dull shades
of green and brown and grey.
He stifles his tears—so much for "emotional"—as time slows
and reality bends to hear him for the first time.
The agony in his eyes belies a boy who believes he was born cursed.
He tells me of the times he has been happy, sad, angry,
but mostly that he is afraid.
His hands are spattered red with liquid love,
the blood of righteous anger.
The van sputters to an uneasy rest.
We sit under the hawthorn tree and he reaches up above his head,
past the branches,
towards the sky.
The haws that he plucks are a startling red.
They look like poison, but he's eaten about a thousand
and none of them have killed him yet.
His nine lives are best spent elsewhere.
If he believed in true love, he'd be a hopeless romantic.
But as it stands, he says,
he's mostly just hopeless.
Rebellion is a cocktail best served cold.
Bitter black tea, three chords, and the truth.
The secret ingredient is the way to get there.
The taste is strong and it burns the tongue,
but he swears by it.