'untitled collage' by Charles Kahler
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I pull up to the door beside Honey Dew donuts in the heart of whatever downtown this downtown is replicating. A lady hits a broken parking kiosk and name drops government employees as if they’re estranged family. As if I’m estranged family. It feels like the Massachusetts I know.

Melody and James just woke up– it’s another thing I love about them. In high school, or even college when I could pull it off, I’d sleep until noon, sometimes two. Then I found shame. I was so wrong. It infected me. Then I found reclamation, and now I wake up at eight, every day. But not Melody and James. TikTok in bed is pure fun when you’re in love. Anything can be the morning newspaper in that light. 

Melody needs caffeine and I’m already three cups deep, otherwise insane, and today’s enough of a change to induce a mild, uncertain antisedative. I'll need to flood my body with whatever I can. The rainbow in the oil puddle or something like that. Friends catching up. 

At Bing Bongs, we order spiked lattes from a woman with a lisp and ass so fat her jeans don’t reach her waist, which is now something for my eye to deal with and avoid. It’s not the place. You can’t be sure anymore, but there’s enough hair dye here to paint an incriminating Rorschach out of all of us. 

Over our boozy maple bourbon latte monstrosities, the urge to torment someone/myself tapers to playful teasing and I feel lovable again. Melody fills me in on job snafus and how it seems the only adventure left in the world is a dramatic exit. Miraculously, the day she quit, her old employer hit her up about returning, at a raise, and ruined the whole thing.

Turning into an almost TV-caricature of an indignant dad, clasping his hands over his stomach, leaning back in his chair, and absorbing just a beat of silence, metabolizing suspense, James utters, with a hint I suspect of sour pleasure, “the boy greatly disappointed me” and Melody says that Eve is actually visiting and staying the night. I do my best impression of a man whose ass hasn’t fallen out of his ass. 

Sometimes beige is crucial to the portrait and sometimes I respond with “that’s awesome.” I can be horny out loud, it’s sort of my thing, but I can’t be horny about James’s sister. He was Judge Steve Harvey 30 seconds ago. And loneliness is less potent than fear, for now at least. I start a story about my dad to get them off my scent, as if any unbecoming thought can be smelled on a certain level. 

My father invited me to lunch last week. I said sure because I am his son and when I arrived, the waitress looked at me funny, turned to my father, and said “oh this must be him.” Ha ha. It makes us all forget how I haven’t stopped picturing James’s hot newly single forbidden fruit actually pretty cool sister, with the party long asleep, bent over Melody’s green velvet sofa giggling and whispering “shh” in my ear.

We’re keeping the tradition alive, me and Melody, though dwindled since meeting James when the world stopped. We Christmas shop together, hungover, and I always need to shop in the essay-due-tomorrow kind of way, except we’re not hungover and I want to be sad about this but I’m not, we’re half drunk and fully caffeinated walking the backstreets of their relationship. They like to catch a buzz, which is part of the reason this whole thing lives on. It follows its course. We start about their apartment, admittedly stunning, in the heart of the city. Melody can turn any room into a spectacle with her miniature this and vintage that. Next, to affirm The Decision, they are Salem People now, with its witch themed Mexican restaurants and museums about museums and sock boutiques and Christmas themed pop culture crew necks and better prices getting worse daily and mission statement restaurants and craft beer beards and ten years past the point and not really knowing or caring and aging punks who believe in Star Wars. They're a beautiful couple. Not one of those couples who lug their private world everywhere they go. With their side huddles and whispers of “same page”. The addiction to their private world couples who suck on cozy separation like an iron pacifier. Not them. Warm your feet in their glow and hope for your chance at the big dance. It’s why I go to them. They're the thing. The sun. Toward them we bend like plants. To step into their world is to step into a parallel cartoon world a little more colorful and a little funnier.

On the way across the street back to their apartment, Melody tracks Eve’s location on James’s phone to a cafe about a mile away, studying for her boards, though I won’t learn what that means for hours. I don’t ask questions about Eve when I want to. Melody pulls out a board game, one she designed and made for James last Christmas, that through playing, tells the elaborate origin story of their 50+ “adopted” stuffed animals. If it was anyone else… Along the blue-green and orange game track, inside jokes, invented dances, and cutsie stories tell a parallel narrative of James and Melody falling in love. It warms me! I’m sick! I love whatever silences the hater within. It’s also the root of my alcoholism. Alcohol problem. 

Next is consumption mode and I’m in it and shops wedge between breweries between shops and we’re never really at center and I take back everything I said about Salem but not really, more of an addendum, they do sell things I would buy even if I would rather not admit it, and we got a little disco ball hanging plant holder and a mushroom trinket table thing and some cool prints and a bank that’s looks like pig was bred with a basketball and there is a barcade and its a one in one out system and I’m being seduced in some capacity I can’t understand and I’m living in the greatest time there is to be alive because I’m alive in it and this is America and American and what a confusing thing to unpack and be and become and I take an IPA even though I don’t like IPAs but I do like a high percentage of just about anything, especially this and maybe this is what it means when I say America and “good shopping” and Melody and James are in love and I am also here. 

Melody agrees to design a cover for the surprise book of my roommate’s poetry and I take a piss in the worst smelling bathroom of my life. 

A vague wellness store with nothing good except James taking a picture of me wearing a thumb-sized beanie. 

A SantaCon to signal our departure. Another wellness-ish store with a witchy twist! We bump into our friend Jason with his hot antisocial girlfriend by the antique books. I can’t look at artisanal soaps without wanting to eat them. I say it louder so she hears it. 

Back at the apartment Eve arrives and the world is unfair again. I’m buzzed enough to be slick. She’s my buddy’s sister enough to temper it. Twenty-three years old enough to make me question that. She laughs at my first joke, hardly a good one, and all of history is men at war and I could’ve been one of them, lick me sideways, I’ll find the money, I’ve got friends, two here, and you’re not about family yet and I love like an escape valve and I’ll get a head start on the future for the both of us. I am my problem. Just one night, slitted eye, in the back, forever, baby. I’ll be gone until who knows when, baby. Such is life, baby. Don’t go, baby. I was only bluffing, baby. I’m just a baby, baby. I want to be loved too, baby. Don’t go. 

These friendship stimulants, these mix and match packies, this ignoring my friends as they equate the help to friendship. We’re playing Spotify roulette and Ryan Cabrera makes me feel like this, Fastball Slim like that, then I’m spiraling down a city that no one really seems to leave. My rants on the genius of The Hills, now reliable, buoy me like a fake-hip adjunct professor riffing on the snapshot of a pre-camera friendly America. 

We leave to Becca’s apartment to pregame for her boyfriend’s cover band set at some tavern. Craig, who once played on Colbert, now relegated to the cover band circuit of an auxiliary city of an auxiliary state in the heart of the empire, or at the very least, the idea of an empire. Who knows where the money goes. Local legends, nothing to prove maybe. 

Circle forms and who can cut in, not too eagerly now, now you gotta say something, anything. Funny, charming, in rhythm. Time apart affords me an armory of tested analogies, references, perspectives. An affront or offering to intimacy. Business idea: a flash grenade of confetti. Good cover. Good somewhere to start. 

We enter Mercy Tavern and I learn there’s no mercy in this tavern. No standing room, just aisles between tables and my ass at sitting face level. If someone offered me a twelve-beer beer, I would drink it. It’s a game of inches and I’m supposed to dance, join the crowd, be the crowd, for Craig’s sake, perform audience, have fun, subject and object, me and you, brother and sister. My jacket has swollen to elementary school levels of puff. I ask a stranger for a cigarette and she says it's her last one, with another unlit between her lips. She points me to a convenience store .8 miles away according to Google Maps.

Craig’s band plays Night’s on Broadway by the Bee Gees, it’s the first song I’ve recognized, and for a moment I understand. My feet move, I join the party straining to party. I drink eight beers and never seem to get drunk. 

We walk back and I’m drunk. Met a dude I kept calling Johnny Appleseed, had to have been the most handsome man alive. 6’4, barrel chested in a works-with-his-hands kind of way, shoulder-length hair, five o’clock shadow, kind and generous in conversation how objectively beautiful people are, maybe thirty-five. Eve loves the bit and I keep it up. Somehow end up in a playground and I open a can of spiked cream soda and slam it into the mulch. At the last hurrah point, on cue, having watched too much TV, all auditioning for a part in something we’re not sure even exists, and I don't know how I’m getting from A to B, but we’re back at Melody’s apartment, I have my jacket, and everybody is huddled around her phone for Wendy’s delivery that never comes.