YOU AND YOUR boyfriend sit on the porch and watch the sun set. To call it a porch is really a kind of elevation or even glorification. Really, you set two chairs and a table and a pot of flowers on the sidewalk outside your apartment door and called it your porch. You are always worried someone passing by will smash your flower pot. That’s just the kind of person you are. You are sharing a cigarette with your boyfriend, passing it back and forth. Whenever you hand the cigarette off to him, your fingers touch briefly. You have no language for the kind of intimacy you feel, like you are the same person smoking one cigarette, only not.
The view from your porch, which is not really a porch, is devastatingly bad. Spread out in front of you is a parking lot and across the parking lot is an apartment building that looks just like your apartment building, and both buildings are unremarkable but ugly. They are squat and painted brown, brown everywhere, 3 or 4 different shades of muddy brown. To see the sun set you have to look up and over the top of the other building. Behind that building there are some trees, and a much prettier apartment complex, and you watch the sun turn orange and then so red and heavy it bruises the sky purple. You pretend that you don’t feel the heat coming off the asphalt and you don’t see all the cars parked in rows or the mud-colored apartment building across the parking lot. You pretend that the prettier building, the one with the trees, is where you and your boyfriend live.
Really, you are thinking about killing yourself. It is a passive and familiar feeling. You often feel this way. You thought having a boyfriend would make you want to live, but you still hate yourself, and you do not hate yourself less because he loves you; instead this has simply increased the sensation you have that you are a disappointment, to him and to everyone. You are the kind of person who imagines running his car into the freeway median at seventy miles an hour, but you aren’t sure yet whether you’d actually do it. Everything you feel is so sleepy and passive, a painfully bearable kind of numbness. You feel guilty for thinking about killing yourself when your boyfriend loves you, like you are too selfish to love him more than you hate yourself. You’re that kind of person.
Your boyfriend is thinking about how his parents were once very rich but now they are very poor. That’s the kind of life he’s had, like when your foot slips off a rung on a ladder and you’re on your back on the ground before you know it. A head-cracked-in kind of life. A thirty-stitches kind of life. At least, that’s the way he thinks about it, until your fingers brush his again, and then he thinks about your beautiful long fingers that are going yellowish-brown at the first knuckle, where the cigarette rests, even though it seems like you are both too young for that kind of discoloration. Your boyfriend hasn’t had that hard of a life, really, but just possesses the kind of naiveté that leads young people to think that their difficult experiences are the most difficult possible experiences. He’s that kind of person.
When the sky fades and goes dark, your boyfriend takes the last drag of your last cigarette of the evening, and instead of lighting a new one from its burning tip, he grinds the living ember out on the sole of his shoe, right beneath the ball of his foot. When he leans over to do this, you watch him, and you think for a moment you see him from an angle you’ve never seen before, and he becomes something else. Because you’re watching him, you become something else too, and that feeling ripples out until everything, the pavement and the cars, the ugly apartment building and the attractive one, even your chairs and your flowers and the figurines in your window bleached colorless by the sun, takes on a kind of transformed quality. For a moment you are in a parallel reality or a fairy tale, like you have traveled forward or backward in time. Everything is gold. No, everything is the color it is supposed to be, but more so. Even the ugliest thing is beautiful. Maybe it is something holy. But really, that’s a kind of elevation, or even glorification. The moment passes and you aren’t too sure you saw anything worth thinking twice about. You’re that kind of person.