Love, Comet Girl
It was 1997, early winter, you’d come home to the old house that we shared with other punks. The blue house, three stories, no oil for heat, the soon to be condemned house next to the house filled with bikers with beards and black leather. My room was in the front with a cemented over fireplace and a bay window. A painting on the wall by a former lover who I couldn’t stop loving. Your room had a sink in the corner with a plant growing out it. You slept in a sleeping bag on the floor. We were roommates. Friends. You saw me in my room finger-painting fires over alarm clocks because I thought it was a clever way to express that time was burning. I was nineteen, you were only twenty. You thought going out for pizza would help me feel better. Or maybe you just wanted to spend time with me. Remember how cold the winters were, the wine we guzzled to stay warm, the way we romanticized wearing toques indoors, huddled together, like we were French poets during the time of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, like we were more than just broke kids refusing a future?
That night, we walked below an icy sky with the smell of the sea only blocks away as you loomed over me, 6 foot 7, with your beard bedraggled like your brown hair, your shirt with the holes and the band logo, and the Xs over the back of your hands, the ones that looked like permanent marker but were tattoos from your straight-edge high school years. The streetlights shone like orbs above our heads. No cars were out, the roads still slick from last night’s snow. The bungalow houses glowed with TVs, most people were in for the night, too cold to be outside.
A few months earlier, I’d ran away from Memphis and when I landed here, in Victoria, BC, everyone was excited to meet the new punk girl from Tennessee. Did you know that punk once meant gunpowder?
In the cold, we sang lyrics from a death metal song, our breath shining, as we approached the café, and you laughed at my girly voice, the sweetness in my growl. Once inside, the heat lamps on the wall warmed us. We knocked back beer, and you listened to me, saw me, understood there was a smoldering inside me. Do you remember the night you carried my bike home when I was too drunk to ride it?
On the walk back to our house, I saw in your eyes that you wanted to kiss me, but, as you leaned in, I turned my head away.
I needed to be the girl, whiskey legged and merlot tongued, with the most distance between herself and her heart. I wanted to be the girl with the most lovers—those scarred boys, broken bottles and cracked teeth, the boys who never listened. Women are taught to cull their desires, but, back then, mine exploded like supernovas across the dark sky.
Sometimes, I want to go back to that moment, propel myself backwards through time, be the comet girl blazing, let you pull me from my orbit and kiss me. Can you remember us there, drifting inside the lonesome coos of the barges passing by? Maybe longings describe a past to where one cannot return.
Dear punk rock boy, we were both so young, so beautiful next to the sea which surrounded us. We had no idea what was coming. The way we would grow old in spite of our best efforts to stay young. I can still taste the beer. The black olives stuck in our teeth. The way I had to look up to the stars just to be able to see you. Though there was no kiss, we sizzled in the salted air.
