Shadows for Breakfast

Love, reality and a few other minor inconveniences

by Wes Biggs

I locked myself out of her house, 8:30 and the morning sunlight glancing brightly off the water. I just stood there and looked out over the bay from the top of the hill, not wanting to wake anyone.

Guest bed with cat and dog and the confused remains of five months of hot-air balloon hopes. I'd had a ballast but all that was left were the bags under my eyes and a morning so beautiful I was afraid to touch anything for fear that it might shatter.

I drove home across the bridge, glad for the traffic flow, for the unswerving sense of direction. The gas gauge was on empty the whole time, but it didn't work anyway. I got home on my belief in MPG and enough involuntary inertia to see it through. It was a hot day before the equinox, and I had the windows all down and the radio wowing and fluttering as best it could.

That night I saw her again, having driven too far too late at night to hang around for too long waiting for nothing to happen. She put me on the guest list. I ran out of smalltalk. I suppose I should have expected that, should've brought something else to do or someone else to talk to. But daydreams take a while to die.

See, one of the problems with reality is there's no real catharsis, or if there is, you have to bring it about yourself. Questions remain unanswered. There's no narrator to tie up loose ends and no master sleuth to take up the last 50 pages explaining exactly what took place that fateful night. There's no Professor Plum with the rope in the kitchen, just one's own vague conceptions of sociopsychology and a field day for introspection and three weeks with absolutely nothing to do.

It was probably safer that way, if less exciting. There's ambiguity even in a happily-ever-after. Then what? "Ever after" is convenient for daydreams and storytelling, sure. I've just got to start telling myself more complicated stories, that's all. Serialize them. Five cents a word.

If I had a nickel for every misspoken word of my misspent youth, I'd stop on a dime and spend the rest on reconstructive surgery. Aging is the process of realizing how stupid you really are and finding new and laborious means of disguising that fact.

At the end of this passion play in my head, the only one that gets to have an ending, I'm sitting nonchalantly on a streetcorner, smoking a cigarette as the evening fades away, secure in the wisdom that only experience can bring. But I am neither a smoker nor a wise man, and I'm about as likely to learn how to roll a cigarette as the hypothetical watchmaker is to learn to roll the credits for these noncathartic tales.

So seasons change and people come and go, and I'll keep working on my nefarious schemes. When you need me, I'll be out here in the driveway, looking out over the bay, the fool on the hill. I'll be laughing myself silly for locking myself out. And I'll be waiting for the movie.