[ And when did you meet him? ]

                        And when did you meet him?
                          I met him when I was 16.
                              How old was he?
                                    20.
                            How old is he now?
                                    21.
                          Does he buy you alcohol?
                                  Yes.
                            Do you love him?
                                  Yes.


                          She latched onto life, taking the train to shed                  mediocrity. The train takes her to Kyle, whom she met years ago when she was wonderfully innocent. Even now, having seen and experienced much, she clings on to                  naivety naturally.
                            She walks to him in the rain and knocks on the door, a body at perfect ease, a body in love. He walks out into the early spring downfall to                  greet her. It is wet but they stay out as the thunder continues to sound.
                            “Come on in,” he says.
                            He leads her into his space shared by four junkies. Recycled paper fills tables, floors. People come in and out of the apartment all day long. Coffee is forever being made.
                            They sip on their own cup of freshly brewed coffee, listen to electronica in the background, and melt into one another
                “How is school?” he asks.
                She says it is getting less stressful.
                “That’s good,” he replies. He then tells her of his distaste for spring.
                “Have you thought about what you are doing for summer?” she asks. The scene seems black and white. The rain rhythmically descends, the light is dim, and ink overwhelms the room.
                The summer is a continuation of the year for Kyle. His friends will be hopping trains while he stays in Chicago getting acquainted with the city he already knows quite well. Above all, he is a man of details.
                Outwardly, his dirty blonde hair is forever tousled, unbrushed. He has glasses and walks hunched over. His appearance is one of humility while Bailey, humble in tone and shy in manner, has a boldness in her beauty. Her natural splendor sits untouched. Her grey eyes beam.
                In the late afternoon, they dance, giggle, relax. There is a sense of comfort they find when they reject the need for constant excitement. It is glorious.
                While eating cereal for dinner, Kyle’s roommates drift in and out of the space. Al, the oldest of the roommates, hops in soaked. The bearded man smiles at the sight of two, hugging Bailey.
                “Heard anything about tonight?” asks Kyle.
                Greasy is coming home to Chicago. In the city, people are always coming home, and people are always waiting to celebrate their return. Kyle finds himself in a crowd of immobile. He is aware that his need for people, for Bailey especially, is all-inclusive. She, on the other hand, is wrapped up in her desire for experiences, for grandness but unconsciously; she would sacrifice everything for him.
                Already jittery from the lack of food and excess of coffee, Kyle and Bailey linger over to the party. She laughs, internally, at how magnified her double-life is now. Twenty minutes away, she says things she does not mean for the sake of speaking, plays a role for the sake of being. Here, she is a child, the extrovert she once was, becoming bigger than herself, and not taking life seriously enough to remember it.
                She eyes the room. Al is flirting with an older woman. Greasy is circling the room, proclaiming, “I have ADD!”
                A girl turns to Bailey and says, “Shit. All that means is life is that much harder for you” then she walks away.
                            Kyle goes off to the corner laughing with some old buddies. Bailey walks from group to group, conversing, bumming cigarettes from anyone who offers. People start to crowd around as she dances with Al and makes a fool of herself to Daft Punk’s “Superheroes”.
                            The city lights shimmer in the distance, illuminating a chaos everyone feels at home in. But Bailey and Kyle leave early, walking hand in hand to catch the 1:40 train. She finds that her life is lived scene by scene. Above all, she wants fluidity. Yet, stumbling onto the train, she rode back home to monotony.


                Summer comes with temperatures that are unbearably warm. Kyle decides to take the train to surprise Bailey with a visit. He is entranced by her hometown and its pallid liveliness. It is a place where Sunday mornings are spent reading the paper rather than recovering from the night before. With her home, he gets a second chance at childhood.
                Hemingway grew up in this area. The literary great witnessed this town just as Kyle does. Kyle bypasses the houses and storefronts, looking only to the trees. He knows that these are the only facets that have not changed since Hemingway’s youth, and wanting to share something with the man, he clings to the foliage. Kyle recalls when Bailey and him just met, they ventured into their shared passion for Hemingway: “He just felt so much,” they agreed.
                Strolling through the town is a blessing as Chicago is especially toxic for Kyle now. He is sleeping less, writing more, isolating himself. It is a natural reaction. He has spent the last week denying that on an intoxicated Thursday night, he betrayed Bailey. Her name was Lisa. They had been friends for years.
So when he comes to Bailey’s bungalow, he does not have strength enough to take on the stairs that lead to her doorway. He sits down instead. His attempt to be honest is but a whimper.
                Bailey’s mom finds him there and informs Bailey of the sight.
The seventeen year old comes to the doorway, telling Kyle to come on in. He motions for her to sit next to him, and she walks down to his side. He does not dare to touch her. Instead, he looks into her reflective gray eyes, never having understood loneliness so well.
                “What’s wrong?” she asks.
                He apologizes. He almost weeps. He tells her. And the look in her eyes sting so greatly that he sat jealous of her role as the victim.
“I know you are sorry,” she cries, “but I cannot believe that you want to be with me.”
                Her heart is broken. His own heart, annihilated.
                In the months that follow, Bailey retreats, finding thrills right out her door rather than a train ride away. Kyle isolates himself fully. His irregular talks with Bailey are, for a while, his only conversation. He pretends that music, art, and coffee are all he needs yet much more is required for his sanity.
                On the other hand, she tells herself she is not addicted to popularity, or booze, or cigarettes and hooking up with boys without remembering the pursuit the next day.
                She begins to listen to her best friend when deciding how to act. Usually, it contrasts with what she would really do, how she would really act. Her friend tells Bailey to stay away from Kyle. And so she stays away. Even when she goes down to Chicago for a Halloween party and sees him dressed up as powhitetrash drinking beer and keeping his distance. She wanted to say, “I wish we could still talk.” Instead, she fooled around with Peewee Hermann in the stairway.
                Fall comes and thoughts accumulate within Bailey since her time away from Kyle. She wonders why she had kept her purity. She wonders why she realized early on that she loved Kyle but held back from expressing the notion physically.
                And thus, she goes to him. She marches into his apartment so blind sighted by her spontaneity that she doesn’t recognize the sadness Kyle now resides in. She saw nothing in his eyes but boyish hope.
                She woke up the next morning, wounded. She is not an addict, she says. Fuck perfection and therefore, fuck moderation, says the broken soul.