Johnny Rockets (1st draft) 2007

Maybe I was being desperate. Maybe I was forcing a fire to ignite that was barren of fuel. Maybe it was foolish to jump back in right before she went across the country to the left coast for graduate school. Maybe it was something lacking in me, which needed to latch onto her in the name of love to start life again in L.A.
But it was what it was. I couldn’t stop thinking of her; I couldn’t stop dreaming of her. I was with another, a lot of others, but one in particular, which I wanted to be with. And lying next to her I’d wake up consumed with dreams of another. Dreams of C. and
I pushed, and I pushed, and scratched and scratched the match and it lit only weeks prior to her departure. And she went, and there I was in bed with C one day, and after she got on a plane I was back in bed with the other.
But there we were in Pasadena on her dollar, looking for places to rent in the California sun. And still I wondered if this was real, if she loved me, if I loved her, and I did and I do. And at a Johnny Rockets, somewhere outside of L.A., looking for change or a card or something, it fell through the air, straight from her wallet to the table to my eye. I stared at it and Son Of Sam stared back at me. What had I done? What had I been thinking? Why had I ever left, what had gone wrong? How could I put her through so much when it was clear, well over a year later, that she did, it was true, it wasn’t a lie, there wasn’t a question, she loved me.
As I stared at the movie stub staring back at me, I flashed through the prior five years to the day I pulled up in my Vdub, to her town home on Eutaw Street on the edge of hell. I was dressed up, in a black button down with baggy black non-denim dress pants made only for members of the underworld, a different world and she entered the city through her gate dressed up as well, in a tight black button down, tight black dress pants, thick black sandals, and the toes painted black on those perfect feet, together we knew it was official, this was a date!
Years later at that Johnny Rockets somewhere in our minds we may have known it was destroyed. We may have known that all the applications we filled for apartments were wasted paper, that before I earned the 3 grand as planned to float on my return to California, the relationship would end. But at that moment, and at many moments after, I was filled with regret. I was filled with grief. And I look back always wanting to know how my life would have been different, wondering what is fate, and what is faith, and knowing, under it all, that you can make the wrong decision.