never be right

It's the way cigarettes look between 3 a.m. fingers that remind us of adolescence. Faces and names, sketchy with time, are brought back in the haze of bitter smoke. It's the way we store memories in the basements of our minds, and take them out from time to time to remember. The tomb stones of drug addicts and the folded paper notes from lovers we barely knew, remind us of everything we lost. Snakeskin bangles and tattooed hips and rock 'n roll reminded us that the sun still shone behind the clouds.

That was the way we were. Young and stupid and brave. Some had seen too much of love, some too much of hate. Some knew loneliness like a best friend, or a best enemy.

There was the friction of another's jeans and soft lips on shoulders. We knew what is was to love and lose. We were class-A liars, but that's just the beginning. To the world we were statistics on a TV screen, drop-out royalty, the bullets in a broken gun. We were the lucky penny turned tails up. We always heard how we could've been so much more. But that's not the point is it? There was always someone else to go the extra mile. Society didn't need a few other kids high on dreams, with money in their pockets and nowhere to go.

We remember kids with bloody knuckles and black eyes, unfair fist fights in backyards late at night. They weren't fighting each other but more like themselves, and that strange pull to drive off to somewhere, anywhere else. Fists flew in desperate pleas to get out of this city and start over. We longed for that last year, that final night. For some it never came.