He sits there, across from me
Blue chair, blue toes –they match his eyes
Outside: snowing silence
Inside: pen raking paper
Coffee at his elbow, his phone balanced on the armrest
He sits and listens to the voicemails from a long night
12:40PM and he’s still drunk from last night
Fire alarm – first one room, then the whole building
He remembers
Too far into unconsciousness to rouse his body
It’s okay, we said
Standing barefoot in socks covered with pancakes in the snow ten feet from the door
There wasn’t a real fire anyway
Just some kids who woke up their smoke detector
Had they been more careful we wouldn’t have been coatless, shoeless, on snowy pavement the day before term started
People were strange filters for smoke
But the boy in the blue chair had awoken the next day
Chuckling at his own misfortune
With no regret he recalled the alarm
His eyes burst against that notebook page
Lovesickness
That was the word I gleaned from his manuscript
Writing, always he was writing
He only wrote when he was drunk
Now was no exception
Blue eyes, blue veins
Red walls, doors locking
People pass and pay no mind
the echo of a saxophone from the practice room downstairs
upstairs was not so far away from the world
Though the blue eyed boy pretended it was so
And I was game to play along
Go fish.