More Exerts: A Dozen Irises for Lyric

Just posting these until I get a travel drive:

My memory of that day was glazed over with the light gauzy fog of the joint I had lit earlier that day in my student apartment not far from campus. The day came to me in spurts with all the in betweens visible in my mind as light during time travel. Flashes…they came to me like a tape gradually playing and then fast forwarding at random moments. I remember lighting up around six 0’clock that evening, I remember tripping over a rock on my way to Schenley, I remember my first impressions while standing in line, and I remember looking through the telescope only to see that Mars was only a glimmering, almost invisible spec stationed in an immense navy blue sky. There were no stars out that day.

In every stilled picture that came before me, I realized that Sitara Maxine Marshal, the D.C. girl who sent me the optimistic invite to this event, had been lost in the fog somewhere…her face forever to remain unseen, even while standing beside me. I had been floating on cloud 9 and she had been firmly planted to the earth.

(Add-ons)

We clicked up that day and had been great friends ever since yet somehow, at this moment, I kept my real life hidden at the bottom of my wine glass, shadowed in the dust.

(Add-ons)

As I laid in the brisk of the evening, I tried to piece together the significantly disjointed events of the previous summer. Upon taking a leave of absence from the academic prison, I had managed to cuss out my wayward therapist, get arrested for vandalism and attempted burglary, become a lifetime member of my stand-in mother’s blacklist, and cut off all ties to my ex-boyfriend whose baby I was carrying.

Hi Lyric, this is Dr. Bell. I was calling with your test results. Congratulations, your test came back positive was what that ignoramus of a quack called and said to me. Congratulations? What the hell was she thinking? If anything she should have called me into her two-bit excuse of an office and provided me with a free prescription or a shot of aqua vitae...or in modern terms, high-proof, flammable rum. Now that is what I would call a doctor.

(Add-ons)

After Flagstaff, I returned to my apartment that night, lit candles around my room, sat back up against my headboard, turned on Adult Swim, and popped open a bottle of Jean-Marc XO. I cradled it as a babe-in-arms, sipping steadily as my thoughts diffused and I stared at the wall above my TV until I was blank. The warmth of the alcohol caressed my veins and ran through me like a wild fire. Quick. Unsubtle. Independent. Free. My heart palpitated with fuzziness and I closed my eyes, put my head back, and smiled feeling like the gradual release of steam from a hot cup of coffee. Nuwas was poetically correct…my Jean-Marc has the colour of rain-water but is as hot inside the ribs as a burning firebrand. Jean Marc. That would be a nice name...at least if I were French. It was moments like these that made me understand why people named their children after the most absurd things. (Add-ons) It was the inevitable beginning to the end of the story of Innez Donnel Holden.