"Well, sure. Awfully dichotomizes our choices, but..."
"You just..? You did. You used dichotomized in a sentence. Dichotomized. Jeezus *hic* Christ. You're more queer than your stupid fucking haircut."
"Okay. Um, yeah. Well, I suppose I could give you a ride. I mean, if that's okay."
A sarcastic chuckle came from behind the half-closed bathroom door.
"You know *hic* what? I'm gonna be alright. Yup. I'm gonna, uh, I'll be fine. You... Just fucking go home or something."
"Are you sure you don't need anyone to walk you to your house? I mean, it's late, you know?" In her drunken stupor, she mustered up her most balanced stance and swung the nearly empty bottle of Wild Turkey in what her blurred sense of perception thought was my face.
"Holy sh- what the fuck!?"
"Well, David, do YOU know? Huh, do ya? Do ya know? Do ya fucking know? That's all you *hic* do, you just fucking know. You spend all your time with your "grand" ideas and your, uh, artistic stuff and whatever. You're so full of shit you can't even recognize it anymore. Go back to your room and *hic* play your Tom Waits and masturbate." The bathroom door slammed shut.
I didn't bother to take note of the weather or the time or the moonlight or even the muffled music coming from the unattended stereo in the living room, which had inevitably cycled to the obscure basement of my music library.
But I did take note of the sound of her boots kicking open the back door, and the slipshod screen door rattling soon after. I did take note of the several drunken expletives she hurled at me as she grasped what was left of the whiskey and dragged it across the cheap kitchen counter. I took note of the oddly graceful way she moved when she carried it; a perfect silhouette in the harsh, flickering fluorescent light. I took note of my desperate lunge to the back door in an effort to change a night that had already been bled to death.
"Enjoy your evening with your cat", she sneered. Turning the alley corner, she mustered a final hateful swing with the newly-emptied bottle and shattered it into a thousand alcoholic glass slivers; I took note. Just as I always do, I took note. Oblivion was in the last bottle, and I took note.
She gradually faded into the dimly lit alleyway, leaving only the eerily visible fluorescent red in her hair as a memorial of her passing. "I miss you."...of all the things I could have said, I said "I miss you." Fuck.
I didn't have any more comebacks; not even a vapid movie line to shout triumphantly and pierce the indifferent night. I didn't even have a quick serenade. I had a a fistful of her impossibly patched jean jacket and a bloodied ego. And in perfect fatalistic fashion, as she was swallowed back into the night, I caught her last mumbled response:
"Yeah, I know."
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