Trench Coat Hallucination One
The rain patters down on us as we sit on the picnic table outside your dorm. I see the water slicking down your bangs, onto your nose, off your nose onto your pants. You raise your cigarette to your lips occasionally, looking very much a young jaded bohemian. Would that I could be so effortlessly beautiful and broken. My cigarette dangles from long fingers, unsmoked. I�m afraid to take a drag and ruin the moment with a cough, so the ash builds up on its tip as smoke rises into the air, mingling with the rain.
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The building�s been there since the 60�s. The picnic table, the 80�s. The two teenagers, five minutes ago. He is wearing a long black trench coat, blue jeans, and Birkenstocks � no socks. The rain smooths his blond hair down to his head. He holds his cigarette like he knows what to do with it. He closes his eyes and inhales slowly. It�s not a $7 cigar, but it works. Eyes open again and blue surveys a world gray with smoke and rain and cement.
The girl next to him is young � too young to belong on a college campus, too young to be smoking the cigarette in her small, pale hand. She lets it burn down unattended, flicking off the ash every once in a while and watching it scatter over the sidewalk. Her hair is slowly turning to a mass of brown hairspray silk in the wet. She leans forward, her tan coat rumpling, double row of buttons pressing together. She looks like she�s about to say something, but doesn�t.