Í Gær

The wind picks up and I'm taken back to when we used to sit outside by the water tower, before it became a repository for potentially carcinogenic cell phone transmitters, and we would sit and we would look. We drank beers, the wind blew and it was February and freezing but we drank regardless, holding them in blue hands savoring the internal warmth. We would drive to capitol hill for the beer, to a convenience store that didn't card or maybe just didn't card us, and it was a trek and had to be done with more than one person, someone to buy the beer and someone to circle around the block because there was never any parking. When we were done we would carefully stack the empty bottles back in their case and leave them for the maintenance crew to pick up in the morning. We always said that when we turned 21 we would buy a full case of beer and leave it with a note, thanking whoever cleans it up for picking up our trash for four years. We still haven't yet though.
I remember being fifteen or sixteen and trying to smoke weed at the water tower in the midst of a downpour. Her first time, and we felt like seasoned veterans even though we had only smoked maybe seven or eight times before. The rain came down at angles and the wind howled and we huddled for warmth, coaxing the flame from the lighter.
On my sixteenth birthday party, the water tower had some type of violent rupture, and sprayed water in a graceful ten foot arc from the side of the top disc, cascading down onto the grass. We ran through it and I had had four or five beers and felt as though it had happened specifically for me, a birthday present.

Thank you, mr. Earle

Me, I wasn't even tryin',
you could say I was content.
She went through my life like lightning,
blew out the other end.
And I still taste her kisses, smell her perfume in the wind,
and if I could you know that I would do it all again.