I am peeping through the paper blinds to see if the day is still light. The darkness is trickling to the ground but it’s not there yet and the big, yellow-balloon sun is still resting on top of the roof across the street, flaming lots of beautiful pollutant-inspired colors. I’m waiting for it to drop already so I can open up the window and slip outside. I won’t risk it before darkness.
Dropping the blinds back into place, I lie back on my bed. You will never know an evening more beautiful than the ones in Los Angeles. You will never feel the air turn pink, like it does here, and watch it pour through the flimsy blinds, refracting and doubling on the closet mirrors. Even though, right now, in my agitated state, I can barely appreciate it--
We are moving and I won’t go.
I’ll climb out my dirty bedroom window before I’ll ever let a single person remove a single part of this life from me. I’ll wait till dark and I’ll do it. And I won’t think too much, and I won’t bring too much, and I won’t ever say a word.
They want to bring me to New York, where the humid nights eat you up, and where the sky is too overcast to ever turn pink. I have been to New York and walked bent through the heavy air. I’ve been all over New York, where the grimy subway roars by, and they make you get on it, one hand on your shoulder, one hand on a sweaty pole.
So I won’t go. I won’t. I’m going to stay in this great, flat city. I am going to watch a billion identical sunsets after this. And it’s all going to start with one young leg out the window.
I roll over and try to nap. Through my bedroom door runs the sleepy talk of the tv and my parents shifting on an old couch. I know if I close my eyes for just fifteen minutes then the time will come. Tomorrow morning, early, they will knock on my door with their suitcases piled in the living room. They will knock on my door and no sound will come back. I’ll be eight hours away by then, leaning on some alleyway wall in some alleyway they’ve never seen.
I wait fifteen twisted minutes with my eyes closed. I'm following a mistaken, arduous path of counting to sixty fifteen times. It's tripping up and broken, but it calms me slowly and rhythmically... I eventually lift myself up and kneel on the mattress, my eyes open and peeking through the blinds.
I’m spun with adrenaline by what I see.
It’s black as one of those liquid, velvet cats you see sliding in a dark smear down the side of some gravel alley. I have seen so many of them. I have touched them tentatively and fed them. I have seen the pure and deep blackness of their fur, and that’s what I’m seeing now. The dark is so dark you wouldn’t know that pink even existed.
And still the sleepy tv talk comes trailing from the living room...
My backpack is next to me on my bed. I hold onto one strap and with my other hand lift open my bedroom window. My familiar, old bedroom window. Oh man, how many times have I looked out of you, you know? How many times have you shown me the same exact scene? The same tree and the same house across the street. The same alleyway entrance full of shaggy fruit trees, oh and my favorite cats, and my favorite pebbles and stone walls. It’s all my favorite. When you have to leave, anything is your favorite. I lift open my favorite bedroom window, and one young leg pokes out.
Of course, this is the last time I will ever see this bedroom window again.
I think I am escaping those who want to move me, but I am only moving myself.
