willful abandon

George sits across the restaurant table and talks about art films and important novelists and experimental jazz and Kayley thinks she might scream. Long and loud and deeply, with great feeling. With high passion. George is talking to Kayley about art and novels and music because, he’d told her, those were the things he was most passionate about. Kayley thought either they had different definitions of the word or, more likely, that George was lying through his teeth. He’d been talking for twenty minutes straight, a monologue interrupted only long enough for her to interject polite noises like “Really?” and “Hm,” and it just seemed like an attempt to look cool. Passion wasn’t coolness; it was dirty and messy and unselfconscious. It was the least cool thing of all, and Kayley wanted to scream with it.

“The thing about the Swedish postmodernists,” George says through a swig of merlot, with what he must have thought was a roguish lift of his eyebrow and a self-satisfied chuckle, “is that their Swedishness was completely at odds with their postmodernism—”

Kayley screams, long and loud and deep with passion.

It is their second date.

+++

When you are young, everything is new and shiny, wrapped in possibility. The world is filled with so many stories, and you don’t know what your ending will be. Who knows what amazing career could come out of that new job! Who knows if your exotic and extroverted new roommate will be your new best friend! Who knows what will happen on your next date, how the evening will unfold, what you’ll do, what you’ll talk about, how far you’ll go!

Kayley isn’t young anymore, and she knows exactly how far she’ll go with a well-meaning and boringly handsome corporate artist who cannot stop trying to talk to her about soulless things. Kayley has seen the way things went in previous chapters, and there aren’t any surprises anymore.

+++

George says good-bye at the subway entrance, and it’s clear he doesn’t want to say good-bye at all. Kayley’s outburst at dinner hasn’t scared him off; on the contrary, it seems to have made him more interested. This is not a surprise either. George thinks it makes Kayley dangerous and crazy, a free spirit. He thinks it makes her someone uninhibited in bed. Kayley is completely over whatever George might think, and she shakes his hand and turns away when he leans in for a kiss. She rushes down the steps and through the long tunnel to the other end of the platform, and then takes a different set of steps back up again. She isn’t tired and doesn’t feel like going home yet, but that was none of George’s business, after all.

+++

At a bar downtown Kayley sips her gin and tonic and watches the old bartender handle the regulars. She’s way overdressed for the dive bar, wearing a cocktail dress, carrying a purse, her hair pulled up and back. Still, no one pays her any attention. She used to live in the area, and this bar was her favorite. The old pub next door has been turned into a hipster lounge, trafficking in fake grime, contrived decadence. The bar she’s in now though, that’s the real thing. The alcoholics here are passionate about their addiction, and that’s something she can respect.

Kayley needs for something to happen. The itch in her chest that had started in the restaurant with George seemed to grow with each block she walked down, and when she got to this street and the two bars, side by side, she couldn’t decide for a minute. She stood on the sidewalk exactly in between them and considered. She needed excitement, an uproar, a feeling of life. On her right, in the lounge, music pulsed out from the seams of the door and took over the street. Sweet young things went in and came out, laughing and stumbling and making out by the side door and the aluminum trash barrels. Kayley needs for something to happen.

But she also needs something real, and so she walked to her left and stepped into the quiet dive bar, waving hello to the ancient bartender as he mixed her gin and tonic.

+++

“Young people, you don’t know what you have. We didn’t know then, and now you don’t know.”

Kayley has made friends with one of the regulars, an old alcoholic named Jim. She let him bum three cigarettes and then just handed him the pack. In exchange, she asked him for his stories, and he happily began telling them. Like George, Jim speaks in monologue, a steady stream of unbroken narrative. Unlike George, Jim is funny and heartbreaking and unfettered and passionate.

Right now, his passion is about his lost youth, and Kayley’s comparative youngness.

“The fire comes so easy when you’re young, and you think you’ll have it forever, that it’s part of your gut and soul. And then life takes over and you get caught up in it all, all the little battles, and then you wake up one day and poof!" Jim throws his hands into the air so enthusiastically that he tips back a little too far, and Kayley moves her hand out as though to catch him. Jim scowls at the gesture, and throws his hands up again, more emphatically this time, to prove her wrong.

“Poof!” he says, remaining standing. “The fire’s gone. Even the embers, gone out with the wind.”

“What fire are you talking about?” Kayley asks. “Like, activism or building something or—”

“Doesn’t matter. Whichever you want. All of ‘em. They all go. Fire to build with and fire to burn it all to the ground.” Jim sighs and sits back on the bar stool and takes the new drink that Kayley’s ordered for him. “Even the fire to burn it all down disappears with age. Without that, how can you start anything new?”

The itch in Kayley’s chest gets stronger, beats a staccato rhythm. She has an almost uncontrollable urge to kiss Jim, not sexually, but passionately. But Jim is focused on his gin and lost in thought for whatever used to light his fire and so instead Kayley raises her glass and taps it against the edge of Jim’s and says

“Cheers.”

+++

Fire trucks pass Kayley on her walk home from the subway, their lights blazing, but when she gets to her block her apartment building is still standing. Real life isn’t as poetic as all that. She opens her cell phone on her walk and checks her messages. One is from George, and she deletes it without listening. One's from her sister, and she shuts the phone for the time being.

It’s almost four in the morning but no one’s around outside her building; either the party kids haven’t gotten home yet or they decided to sit out a night for a change. Kayley unlocks her building’s door and walks up three flights of stairs and unlocks her deadbolt and then locks it behind her again. Nothing happened on her way home; the night was without incident, good or bad. How can a person be expected to live without incident? Kayley wonders. Without burning things down or starting things new.

Kayley’s exhausted, and she kicks off her shoes and opens her window and climbs up her fire escape to her roof. She isn’t supposed to be up there, but she’s tired and the view is beautiful and the sun will be coming up soon and the itch in her chest is beating a drumbeat she can’t find the rhythm to. She lies down on the black tar and wiggles into the hard surface, wishing she’d brought a pillow. There’s a rose color at the edge of the horizon, she can see it just past the skyscrapers and the trees. She fights to keep her eyes open as the rose turns to red and orange and gold, to stay awake long enough to see the sky turn to fire in front of her eyes.

“Poof,” Kayley says, and smiles.