F I C T I O N
That dog
By Brent Bakeman
The bright lights and the big city embraced her like a warm drowning, and she crossed her arms and smiled both subjects completely complimentary; LA needs fresh innocence and she needed experience. I drank down visions of her by that basin that had cast thousands of glowing sunsets over the shattered lives of Debbie’s for a long time.
We hadn’t spoken for a while now. Memories of me couldn’t touch the energy and excitement of the downtown clubs. Between the cellphones and the Mercedes and The Academy Awards and the occasional star sightings Debby was bigger than a smaller town and a particular heartbroken man who enjoyed his friends and his small pond. There was a long time that my imagination sat me down with those nasty visions of my lost love and her new life.
You propel yourself through your landscape all the while with one goal, to be happy. As simple as that sounds most don’t realize that. Too often we let outside perception dictate our lives, and that which truly brings us joy is forgotten in the wake of what we SHOULD do.
I try to learn that now. I am trying to forget the responsibilities I had placed on myself when I was a WE. I no longer have a need for a ring, at least two carats, or a mortgage, future mini-van, or separation of our single friends from our together friends, or a list of parents to visit this year for Christmas.
I want a dog.
And a car that can take that dog and I over miles of road. I want to sit by the campfire and have a drink at the bar and joke with the guys that the girl at the softball field was looking at me. I want to remember Debby and be OK with it. I want to be there.
That freeway still heads south to that smoggy basin. And it will long after Debby and I are gone. But if nothing else I know that we scrawl our names on that implacable wall that embraces, like breath, souls and minds of countless upon countless that were before and always will be – like me – or maybe us, grating the youthful ease at which we thought of the world.
.I want to be there.
