Make Out

We’re on the deck, my startling Brooklyn deck. I'm giving him a tour: my landlady lives there, the morning glories are there. Then he talks. I nod and laugh.

After ten minutes of this, I figure he’s either gay or scared shitless. If it takes him more than ten minutes to kiss a girl lit up with white wine and moonlight, he might as well be both. And a space alien.

There have been other men on this porch. Ones who have wanted to kiss me but wouldn’t dare, ones who kissed me across state lines from their girlfriends or wives, ones who kissed me once but never kissed me again. They all sat in my plastic white deck chairs. One even feng shui-ed the place by moving the circular table to the corner with more sun. I moved it back after he left.

I tried to plant things on the deck, once. An Easter package arrived from my suburban mother containing seed packets and small rust-colored pots. I was supposed to loose soil from tightly-packed disks with a table fork, water, and wait. Oh how I waited.

Weeds grow, though, freely, fearlessly, from a shallow Chinese porcelain pot my roommate’s boyfriend bought when he lived with us. One morning I came outside and the weeds were two feet tall, fed fat by the May rainfall, fed tall by the delicious spring sun. I ripped them out with a metal spatula, then washed it in scalding water so I could flip my pancakes.

The sky is clear and the moon blindingly full. He’s still talking but I can’t make out the words. I can’t make out, period.