somewhere, smiling :)

[that power; 2:57]

… this is on a bus back from camp,
I’m thirteen and so are you…

Before I left for camp,
I imagined it would be me and three
or four other dudes I hadn’t met yet,
running around all summer,
getting into trouble…

It turned out it would be
me and just one girl.
That’s you.

And we’re still at camp as long as
we’re on the bus and not at the pickup
point where our parents would be waiting for us…

We’re still wearing our orange camp t-shirts…
We still smell like pine needles…

I like you and you like me and I more-than-like you
But I don’t know if you do or don’t more-than-like me.
You’ve never said.

So I haven’t been saying anything all summer,
content to enjoy the small miracle of a girl choosing to talk to me,
and choosing to do so again the next day, and so on…

A girl who’s smart and funny and who,
if I say something dumb, for a laugh,
is willing to say something two or three times
as dumb to make me laugh,
but who also gets weird and wise sometimes
in a way I could never be…

A girl who reads books that no one’s assigned to her.
Whose curly brown hair has a line running through it
from where she put a tie to hold it up while it was still wet…

Back in the real world,
we don’t go to the same school, and
unless one of our families moves to
a dramatically different neighborhood,
we won’t go to the same high school.
So, this is kind of it for us.
Unless I say something…
and it might especially be it for us
if I actually do say something…

The sun’s gone down and the bus is quiet…
A lot of kids are asleep…
We’re talking in whispers about a tree we saw at a rest stop
that looks like a kid we know…

And then I’m like, “Can I tell you something?”

And all of a sudden I’m telling you

And I keep telling you…
and it all comes out of me
and it keeps coming
and your face is there
and gone
and there
and gone
as we pass underneath the orange lamps
that line the sides of the highway…

And there’s no expression on it…

And I think just after a point I’m just talking to lengthen the time
where we live in a world where you haven’t said “yes” or “no” yet, and regrettably, I end up using the word “destiny”…
I don’t remember in what context.
Doesn’t really matter.

Before long I’m out of stuff to say and you smile and say, “okay”…
I don’t know exactly what you mean by it,
but it seems vaguely positive,
and I would leave in order not to spoil the moment,
but there’s nowhere to go because we’re on a bus,
so I pretend like I’m asleep and, before long,
I really am…

I wake up, the bus isn’t moving anymore.
The domed lights that line the center aisle are all on
I turn and you’re not there.
Then again a lot of kids aren’t in their seats anymore.

We’re parked at the pick-up point,
which is in the parking lot of a Methodist church.

The bus is half empty.

You might be in your dad’s car by now.
Your bags and things piled high in the trunk.

The girls in the back of the bus are shrieking and laughing
and taking their sweet time disembarking
as I swing my legs out into the aisle to get up off the bus…
just as one of them reaches my row.

that used to be our row,

on our way off…

It’s Michelle,
a girl who got suspended from third grade for a week
after throwing rocks at my head…
Adolescence is doing her a ton of favors body-wise…
She stops and looks down at me
and her head is blasted from behind by the dome light,
so I can’t really see her face.
But I can see her smile.

And she says one word: “destiny”…

Then her and the girls clogging the aisles behind her all laugh
and then she turns and leads them off the bus…

I didn’t even know you were friends with them.

I find my dad in the parking lot.
He drives me back to our house
and camp is over.
So is summer,
even though there’s two weeks until school starts.

This isn’t a story about how girls are evil
or how love is bad.

This is a story about how I learned something,
and I’m not saying this thing is true or not,
I’m just saying it’s what I learned…

I told you something.

It was just for you
and you told everybody.

So I learned cut out the middle man, make it all for everybody, always. Everybody can’t turn around and tell everybody, everybody already knows, I told them.

But this means there isn’t a place in my life for you
or someone like you.
Is it sad? Sure.
But it’s a sadness I chose.

I wish I could say this was a story
about how I got on the bus a boy
and got off a man more cynical,
hardened, and mature and shit…

But that’s not true.

The truth is I got on the bus a boy.
And I never got off the bus.
I still haven’t.