Amanda chain-smoked and scrolled the iPod we wired
through the tape deck. At the wheel, I hand-blocked
oncoming high beams. Santa Cruz would give us
a couch for the weekend for no other reason than
we were twenty and laughed easily. We’d hoped to
beat the sun from Sac City College to the coast; we wanted to
see it disappear into the Pacific, slowly, then suddenly, the way
a person comes to accept an inconvenient truth; but we stopped
for burritos in San Jose, where it took an hour to find La Vic’s
because we’d only been there once, drunk at 1 AM. Tongues laden
with pork fat and tortilla dust, we sang along to The Ugly
Organ as we passed through patches of fog that hung like
cartoon ghosts over Highway 17. I was probably in love, but
saying so would’ve changed everything—starting with this:
she turned the stereo down and said we should stop for gin & limes
before the grocery store closes; she then lit a cigarette for me,
again on a cherry she’d kept alive for hours, this one
since 15th and W, the on-ramp for I-80 West; and again
and again, we pulled from the same, separate fire.
Erik Wilbur 