So Annalysse was there, married and everything, and did it feel melancholic or something? That uncomely embrace, that awkwardness of distance after, and all the ways how that feeling can cover everything in a fog, so distant and close all at once. And did it feel really strange to see her again? Probably, I was mostly thinking about her makeup, how it lay on her face, it rested on her face and being with her alone near home, above the road and home, shooting red trail of light away with her circle of friends from high school, all having so much sex apparently, and urging this romance as we walked off and how she tasted so much like chewing gum, and how "Extra" chewing gum used to be so much more important in my life, as did walking around the hill. To be close to her, and then now, as we were there in this vile little bar in this unrelenting suburb, the largest in the country, just stretching on and on, not interminably just ever present and surrounded by these hills on all sides and I was like "we should go walk up a hill" but she wanted some unspecified drink, and I was not going to deny her that you know, I didn't deny her anything except in the past which appeared so close and permanent.
So she is sitting in this bar, that had been all polished up like some dinner service so that it all seemed oppressively tidy and collected and there were all these photographs on the walls in thick dark wooden frames of what this big suburb looked like in its past, real dignified and colonial, scrubbed out and close cropped, grim pioneer gray. And Annalysse talked and talked and it was great, it was really great. She told me about so many people and everything, how Rebecca would just fuck anything with no scruples and would just ruin guys, and all the time her eyes were lit up and she seemed so concerned that no-one really wanted to "do" anything with their lives, were just content, and you know I wasn't like in love with her or anything, but it was really adorable. Like when she was seventeen and everyone had so much promise, you know and there were none of the kids that had been made and had to be worked around, no bad decisions and all these purchases that hang around you you know like this great failed jewel case CD collection I had once and how that feels real stupid now, all those things that weigh upon you or are pressing on you, and this sense of some gilded innocence permeating everything in this disbelieving belle epoque, and god that place was so vile you know before it all disappeared not so much the hill just the feeling you know, that future pressing on clearly. And her pressing on clearly and keenly, all spearmint or peppermint green or blue with that discrete powder covering it. Anyway, it was really pleasant seeing her again you know, I feel different and everything but she was something indefinable.
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