Hometown Tour
I daydream of giving my twitter crush a tour of my hometown, Elgin, Illinois, driving him around the Chicago suburb, saying hey, here's the high school I used to sneak out of to get high, across the street is smoker's corner — since you couldn't smoke squares on school grounds we'd cross over to Van Street where deans could do nothing about it — here's the Taco Bell parking lot we'd meet in when a keg party got busted by the cops, many people puked in that bathroom and sometimes I held their hair, here's Wing Park where like 20 of us made a bonfire in the woods after eating acid, here's the other Taco Bell, the one close to my parents' house that a friend and I once broke the windows of with rocks because it was closed in the middle of the night when we were drunk and hungry, oh and here are the places drunk kids would pull over to semi-privately fuck in their cars.
And in the daydream, he smiles, he smiles big and a lot, he's happy, I can't believe how happy, over such small things, and he says, that's cool, oh that's cool too, oh that's so cool, I love knowing your background, I can't wait to show you my hometown next, the places that formed me, the places where I got into mischief, and I know we're 40-something, not teenaged, and we're sober right now, not drunk, but I don't see why we can't pull over, fuck in the back seat of this car, or in the front, maybe try out both for size, sweat out the bittersweet nostalgia of old memories to make room for the new, not young but still eager, elbows and knees and bellies, learning each other's bodies and laughing as my head bangs the head rest and your bra gets jammed between the seats.
Jay Vera Summer is a writer and artist living in Chicagoland with her small dog, Walnut. Find her at twitter.com/jayverasummer and jayverasummer.com.