i can never get to sleep : rebel rebel no

this was the first time i ever saw her: on frenchman, its mardi gras. she is holding out a half-empty bottle of whiskey to me and I am taking it. flat chest, short hair. i know which side of the fence she lives on but this doesn't stop me from falling in love with her. wrist raised high above her head, hand hanging down. lost in the moment. long and skinny legs in dark black jeans. i drink deeply from the bottle.

she wrote letters to me while I lived in california. i had no job. i slept in a friend's garage. she said, "i love you because of those failures. even though everything might have blown up in your face, you tried something. the whole time I've been alive I've never tried to do anything."

i told her, "there isn't anything in this world that you couldn't pull down and then rip up into pieces. there is nothing that isn't yours."

she picked me up from the airport in a blue ford explorer. it was hot in new orleans. we drove back to her house in relative silence and when we got there she said, "well, i guess you live here now" and took her shirt off. we laid down together. i hadn't even asked to stay with her.

i'm not really sure where the money came from for the rent. during the day we didn't do much. she would wear a white tshirt and slacks, sometimes she would be gone on little errands. I got the feeling that some kind of family member was paying for us but at the time I didn't really think about it. i didn't ask.

i would hardly leave the house. i had a paperback copy of siddartha and a paperback copy of the sun also rises. my ribs showed from having only coffee for breakfast and white bread sandwiches for lunch. now that I think about it, we hardly ever ate produce.

she had a hard time sleeping. at night we would lay back on white sheets and I would tell her I loved her. she would let her hand hang off of the edge of the bed. there was never sex. i would rest my face on her chest and feel her pull cigarette smoke into her lungs. i loved her like a baby loves a mother, like that teary feeling you get at the back of your eyes when you want someone bad and it's comfort. she would rub my hair until I slept and in the middle of the night I would wake up and see her looking out the window, slacks on but no shirt. three in the morning and chain smoking, looking at nothing. i got the feeling she was sad.

we went on a tear once. shoplifted a twelve pack and drank it on her linoleum kitchen floor. i can't remember what she was wearing. she drank too much and stood up and looked drunk and said to me, "i don't even know what you're doing here anyways. what are you doing here?" and I could see tears starting at her eyes corners. she made these bundles of flowers tied together with thick, rough twine and then let them hang all over the house. it was her only nod to decoration. i wanted to fuck her that night; to hold her down and press my thumbs into her skin and make her see why it was i was staying there. why she was everything and it was about to rip my head off. instead i walked across the city and back and when I got there she was still awake.