expect the unexpected.

Sixteen blocks to the liquor store, each way. It was strange that night. The air was still save a hint of wind spreading rumors of winter. I didn't feel cold. My landscape was decorated with flickering construction signs and chain link fences. Once manicured-turned-feral trees defiantly pushed up sections of the cracking sidewalk with their elephantine roots. Splintering mailboxes and tilted phone booths bowed in reverence as our royal procession moved past. I marched alongside of you -- the cadence of your cowboy boots hitting the concrete. Jokes flew back and forth between the three of us. We were soldiers, travelers, vagabonds. Nomads wandering through the urban desert. I felt simultaneously young and immortal.

You kept asking if I was cold,

The more you asked, the warmer I felt.

Before I knew it, we were sipping Bushmills out of red plastic cups and swigging Newcastles that had become almost sufficiently chilled just from the walk home. And I was singing with you as you strummed.

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
"I thought you'd never say hello" she said --


I held the whiskey to your lips


"You look like the silent type"
Then she opened up a book of poems

I felt the corduroy hugging your legs between my fingers

And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

And later those lyrics became promises as you curled around me like a treble clef --

It was two a.m. and you lit your cigarette while standing on the wraparound porch -- snow drifting through the air. Streetlights illuminated circles of air around them. Snowflakes made their brief debut in the spotlight before permanently settling on the ground. There they were, melting into the frozen asphalt. Icy particles fusing to one another for the chilly duration of their brief existence. I could barely make out your voice over the roar of my own heartbeat. We talked -- first it was "pick one: Arlo or Woodie Guthrie?" and a summer ahead of hitching and camping and train jumping and before I could finish my sentence --

Your lips tasted like Marlboro twenty sevens and familiar song lyrics and Irish whiskey.

It's like finding home
In an old folk song
That you've never ever heard
Still you know every word
And for sure you can sing along