An Old Girl

Sometimes I still look her up.

She is still fit and smokey and insistent that she is someone.

In social videos, she stretches out in gyms where weights gleam with the promise of a better body.

Hers is still good. Taut.

Almost the same as I remember it the night we were both spiraling to nowhere. That was the end of my run. I sobered up and changed after that.

But the interests lingered anyway — somethings I could never really get away from. Still can’t.

She kept going for a few years, from what I could tell. I’d see news she’d post about herself around new fiances’ that later disappeared and tattoos she was considering that would stay forever.

Mutual friends would tell me the odd anecdote about her. One tried to sleep with her after his divorce. I don’t know how that ended except that he told me she said that she’d fooled around with me one night. I surprised by how casual she seemed to portray it.

Another volunteered, unasked, that she’d given him a blowjob in his Porcshe while flying down some highway in Sonoma. She told him she just wanted to try it at least once.

I hadn’t really thought about her for awhile.

So when she showed up in the dream, I was surprised.

I had been commissioned by a more successful colleague to film some sort of Monster Truck race at an abandoned airport. There was another film crew onsite for one of the Truck teams and, so, when my photographer and shooter didn’t show up, my friend told me not to worry. There was back up.

Still, it bothered me, not coming through on a promise.

Worse, my shooter was an old friend too, someone I’d worked with elsewhere. He was almost famous and he was definitely good. He was also in the program and we’d become more than just professional associates. We were friends who shared the same way out of the wells of despair and desire and thirst.

But he didn’t show up and I couldn’t get hold of him.

Instead, I was forced to watch the other crew, run by a producer who once worked for me, find the angles and moments that would later make a fine, heart-starting film.

I was on the runway when I turned and there she was, working on makeup for a different shoot (that was one of her side gigs in real life).

The old desire came back for second, but when she turned, her arms flopped loosely past the black wife-beater she was wearing. She looked me with a tender, open sense of recognition — not the drunken hunger to obliterate herself that I’d shared with her the last time we were physically together.

Her teeth were crooked and her gums showed where there were gaps.

She smiled. Old. Wrinkled. Unaware I was all used up.