“And everyone who wanted you
They found what they will always want again.
Your beauty lost to you yourself…”
          -- Leonard Cohen, “Take This Longing”

I remember being stunned. Looking up at them and thinking that their radiance was unbelievable. I felt like the blind man who’d just been cured, like the starving man set down to a feast. In short, I felt like I had just won the biggest prize ever.

In some way, I felt redeemed. Like everything I’d ever worked for in my life had just been made available to me. And I was questioning this gift. As soon as I had the thought formed and the words spoken I wished I could take them back. Looking a gift horse in the mouth and all.

One of them, I don’t remember who now, smiled. Then Dara spoke, and I heard things in her voice that I had never noticed before. Lilting melodies, or sonnets yet unwritten. I understood the concept of the muse. I… I’m rambling about her voice. This is pathetic, and I’m still only really beginning.

Okay. Her voice was beautiful. Now that I’ve established that, this beautiful voice said, “Maybe it’s too much. Why didn’t you give him less?”

Deke shrugged, laughed, and pulled away from the group. I caught the end of his sentence, “…the Lane girl needs a warm arm, and who am I to deny?”

I still couldn’t be bothered to care.

Maybe that’s what I regret most about that period. I didn’t care about anyone, or anything. I just wanted to lie back on that drifting, warm careless feeling, and keep going forever.

But nights don’t keep going forever, and I knew the best way to get invited back, and be able to see her, was to go while I was still fresh enough to be remembered.

So begging my leave, I stood slowly, and walked towards my car, hearing my own footsteps echo. I listened to the ebb and flow of the people around me, and momentarily understood why poets compare crowds to oceans. It had the feeling of a tide, or some other force of nature.

My metaphor lacks something, but I can’t put my finger on it. Pity really, usually I’m eloquent, but this is one of those stories that there’s no good way to tell.

So I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, and I’m staring at all the lights. For a minute I wondered if I would make it down Mulholland, back into the city. I wondered if the chance I was leaving behind me would buy the chance I wanted to take. I wondered if I would grow up to be better than I was.

I started wondering if I really cared.

Then I turned the key in the ignition, let the emergency brake off, and started driving back towards the ruin of a life I called home. I thought about my dad, who would most likely have passed out in front of some infomercial. I thought about the mess that would have to be cleaned up before the next time I invited Matt over. I thought about all of it, and some part of me rebelled, and refused to drive home.

So I pulled into a Shell in Hollywood to fill up the tank while I tried to decide where to drive.

Pulling my wallet out of my pocket, I realized I still had the hundred from the party. For a second everything about it hit me again, and I felt overwhelmed, drowning, dangling on the edge of something too big for me to ever define the size of.

Then I shrugged it off, and unrolled the bill, figuring the best way to get rid of the traces of the illegal drugs was to get rid of the paraphernalia.

About to shove it in the drawer and at the attendant, I saw there was something written on it, and I hastily pulled it back, dropping a couple twenties in instead. I gave the guy forty bucks to cover an eighteen-dollar tank.

I now regret this.

But at the time, it seemed like a good idea. The feeling of knowing I had was lingering, and that feeling told me he was a good guy who was gonna get cheated later in the night.

I had the urge however, to call him Raymond as I walked away from the window. Then I figured the pop-culture reference would be lost on him. Hell, it’s probably lost on most people.

So I just shrugged, waved goodnight, and went back to sit in my car and look at this hundred which had what I was sure was a secret message from the gods scrawled on it.

And it was a secret message. Intended for me, and in the handwriting that Dashiel had acquainted me with belonging to Deke Kendrick. There were only two words on it, but the blessing of the night stuck with me, and I instantly extrapolated their meaning.

Finally the girl with no name had one. She, who I loved more than life, could be properly labeled. And then I could get on with her, and go back to Bethany, my proper obsession.

Only instead, her name became my mantra. I became determined to find out where Lysandra Byrne lived.

Again, I reiterate. I was young.

And obsessed.

I sat in that Shell for twenty minutes, realizing the name of my angel savior girl was written on that bill, and then I crammed it unceremoniously in my pocket and drove through the nearest Del Taco I could find.

Because when the craving for French fries and a quesadilla hits, who am I to deny it?

I drove home after that, and just barely managed to beat the sun through my window. Figured it was easier than possibly waking Dad up and trying to explain to him where I’d been for hours and hours, and why I was just coming home at 6:15.

Sinking into the sweet softness of my bed, I laid the bill under my pillow and looked up at my ceiling, where the glow in the dark stars still stuck. I’d put them up when I was ten. My mom had helped.

I let myself drift into that memory, used the last fading glow to think about mom. I remembered her hair, browner than mine, and her eyes, which everyone said I’d gotten.

Like watching television, I watched us setting stars on the ceiling with temporary sticky. I could hear her humming the theme song from some television show, and could feel her hands on my waist as I climbed the stepladder to put the stars on the ceiling above my bed.

I’d lived in this house since I’d been born, and this was the first time I’d stopped to think about that fact.

But this week’s hour’s up. And I’ve got classes tomorrow. The cynic in me wants to finish with a comment about fucking off, but I know that would just end up in the same record that all this other stuff goes in, so instead I’ll just pretend to be happy I’m going.

I guess it’s the same time next week, right?