Why Can't We Be Ourselves Like We Were Yesterday

"Do you see that?"

I didn't see it. I wasn't even looking.
Jimmy quickly pulls the car off the PCH and into the moonlit parking lot overlooking Malibu.

"What the hell is that?"

My head feels like a lead weight against the seat belt holder. I haven't taken my eyes off the road for the past hour.

"Lil, look."

Jimmy's long finger nail pushes into the bottom of my chin.

"Look," he says softly in my ear.

The warm wind feels heavy on my eyelids and it is at this precise moment I recognize every muscle in my face.
Off in the distance looms an object with a greenish glow, hovering six inches off the dash board, hundreds of feet off of the horizon.

"What do you think that is?" Jimmy asks rhetorically.

Such aberrant occurrences in Los Angeles lost their credible intrigue decades ago.
Their mystique only finds a home in the ones searching for a symbol.
Maybe this was my sign.
I focus on the object and burn it's memory onto the back of my eyelids.

This will come home with me tonight.

Jimmy pulls the car up the driveway.
When I open my eyes the expectation of seeing the object still hovering off in the distance takes my breathe away.
But it's no longer there.
A coyote barks not far below me and for a second, the wind carries up the smell of decomposition. Our neighbor came over yesterday to say that their dog, Johnny Cash, got loose and I can't help but think it's him I smell.

"What do you think happened to Johnny Cash?" I say to Jimmy.

"He died a few years ago," he says, barely listening to me as he walks towards the house.

Through the kitchen window I see people dancing to the muted rumble of Morrissey. My living room is filled with beautiful people that I don't know.
I stand in place in the driveway.
Anywhere other than here is the only thought in my mind.
I climb into the back seat of the covertible and fall asleep.

The car's weight shifts and I feel someone wedging their arms underneath my dress.

"There you are! It's time to go in," Jimmy says.

"But what happened to the green light?" I say.

Jimmy carries me to the back of the house, past the kids pouring wine into the pool, past the boy pissing on my flowers.
I'm too tired to say anything. Too tired to care.
Jimmy stops to talk to our friend Jacqueline in the kitchen and I feel safe against Jimmy's concave chest.

"Is she dead?" I hear someone jokingly say to Jimmy, then the sound of someone unsnapping the jeweled hairclip from my head...