The World Is a Lonely Place
I miss life before the internet
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The days smelled of salt and burning leaves. We’re eating salami sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper, running barefoot on the hot sidewalk, and our heels splinter and bleed and it’s fine, absolutely fine, because we could feel something. We chew, we cough, we bleed. We ride busses to towns called Ronkonkoma and Islip because we imagined them cold and quaking. Houses splintering, cracking, and slipping into the sea. But it was just Domino’s Pizza in thirty minutes and old movies while the rain came down in sheets.
We were two girls at a sleepover playing pretend.
Watch me wind the hot cheese around my finger. I’m wearing overalls, a bra top, and sunglasses indoors and we take photos posing in front of the camera. Kiss kiss. We rushed to the one-hour photo to see what developed. The pictures were slick and thick in our hands as we riffled through them to see what we’d captured. Our blurry faces, our laughing faces, marinara sauce on our chins and how we played Iggy Pop, R.E.M. and Debbie Gibson in the background. But you couldn’t hear the music — it’s what we remembered from the photos we took. We told stories about the times we had — and they were times — and although some of the pictures gathered dust, some of the friends were lost, abandoned, and forgotten along the way, the photos weren’t what mattered. It was the memory of our time. We could feel everything.
We’re on a plane. My body was volcanic because I couldn’t understand the physics of it, how we were suspended in the air moving fast when it felt so still. I’m nineteen, holding a paper ticket to London in my hand for six hours. Liz next to me, holding my hand when the plane shook and I didn’t understand what it was, if we were about to plunge from the sky, if I was wrong to spend $250 to visit our friend in London and Liz saying over and over, it’s just turbulence. We’re okay, we’re fine. We slept in the black taxi to our hotel, which was really an icebox of a room where we paid a pound for an hour of heat. We huddled close and fell asleep in our coats and drank pints in the evening.
We told two men from Rome to fuck all the way off.
We circled all the places we wanted to see on maps. We got lost, spent days eating baguettes and drinking…
