"He tastes like you. But even sweeter."

"This is a town in which no one lives," She said, that little flicker of humor playing on her face as she flipped the lever on her steering column. The click-click of the turning signal punctuated the silence in her little car, drowning out the music playing out of the stereo. Volume low, as not to drown out conversation.

"...yeah?" His lame response.

"I always drive through here, but no one lives in these houses. People just stop by."

"...oh."

"These bananas are over-priced," She said, nodding at the advertisement as she pulled in to the drive-thru lane. "I think they buy them down the street for like a quarter of that. Good profits, I guess."

"I'm allergic."

"What?"

"To bananas. Viciously, even." Fumbling with a cigarette, he tapped her little radio. Trying to find a way to cut through this awkward moment that popped up after becoming lost on the country roads, an impromptu dance in the rain.

Later, she'd say to him---"This town's too small for you."

But he always felt so small.

---

Laying in bed, I was thinking about the time when my life would start. Then I realize it had started, that once I had graduated from high school, I was living 'real life'. That, even though I didn't have a real job or a car or a college education or a relationship that stood up against any form of resistance...that I was already living real life.

I start to think that this is how it always was--that I had died, and in the few last seconds of my brain functioning, it entered a viciously vivid flashback of every moment of my life. That I was reliving a life that had already expired. That all this deja vu--this constant, nauseating feeling that everything I was doing had already happened--was true. That I really was just following a path that I already lived before. So I try to force myself to change the moments as they happened, but all that feels so damned familiar, as well. Like I'm living a lie.

Like I'm wrapped up in a dream, but if I woke up from it, I'd die.

I think it's why I'm insomnic.

---

"Bros before Hoes." "She's not a hoe." "We're not really bros."

A humbling realization that that ridiculous lie we lived could be torn apart so easily. From something so small, from just a few days of misplaced affection and love. From just a single night of a mistake. Not a regret, mind you, which is probably why it caused so many problems. The realization that all that talk about having each other's back regardless of the outcome, all the fist bumping and the stupid grins and the oddly homoerotic intimate moments amounted to nothing more than so much boyhood fancy.

That when we reached adulthood the whole thing would slip through our fingers and we wouldn't really miss it. That we'd talk about our friendship to third-parties and they'd joke that they always expected us to have matching rings by now.

--remember, we were going to have matching rings?

That look if disbelief in a mutual friend's eyes when I say that we're not in contact anymore...that we wouldn't be showing up somewhere as a couple of friends, rather as mutual friends. That tilted head, that awkward hand gesture, that straining between saying one thing or an other. How so many people kinda thought of us as the same person.

...well, I guess we got too close to being the same person. EH. EEEHH?! That's funny.

- - -

Part of growing up is realizing all that shit they sold you on was a lie. That you'll never be a rock star or a CEO or a novelist. That you'll end up like every other Shmoe on the street. That 'true love' is an abstraction of 'settling'. That learning to 'trust' someone meant to rely on them--without actual trust.

That honor and binding words are always temporary. That you'll get burned so many times that you become callous, and cold. That you should hold back all those silly dramatic phrases and frantic text messages trying to salvage the best moments of your life.

Well, fuck that. I want to live--not constantly pretend I'm living. I want to reach out and grab it. I wanna explode. I wanna breathe smoke.

I want to fuckin' live and love--even if it's taboo and makes me look immature. Maybe it is immature--hell, I'm saying I know it's immature.

But I want to love.