Lonerism

The Runaway and the Lost Cause

"Now I think that I should have known that he was magic all along." - Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

The Runaway and the Lost Cause

We were in the youth of our lives, and even then, I knew it was just too good to last.

It all started on a long American summer, somewhere between the silicon glamour of the West Coast and the dry deserts of New Mexico. I was a runaway, and he was a lost cause, with our whole lives ahead of us like the great winding roads we travelled along together.

It was a whole other world back then, where your dreams were all you had and you carried them with you on your shoulders everywhere you went. It was a world of fantasy, a world I created for myself.

My dreams were weightless, and probably foolish, now that I reflect back on my life and see it for the beautiful disaster that it became.

I dreamed of becoming a singer, gliding through meadows of people like a lonely whale in the open sea. I dreamed that my songs would stretch out across that open sea, and my voice would sprinkle over every radio, every cassette, everywhere across America. I dreamed of running away, so far away, somewhere none of my troubles could follow behind me, of becoming no one.

I grew up on the outskirts of the world, a small town in a forgotten fly-over state. My home was surrounded by fields of nothing, empty roads and dazzling night skies. I ran away searching for something better, and I took all my dreams with me on my journey.

I dreamed of falling in love and seeing the world, of building a life for myself that I could look back on and smile. I dreamed of all the boys I'd fall in love with, and how we'd spin and dance and fly, and how nothing would mean more to me than those moments we forget, those moments when the world seeps away and it's just the two of us together, bathing in the blackness left behind.

The day I left home, I looked into my mother's eyes, and I could tell right away -  she knew. In her eyes, I'd already left.

"You're going, aren't you?" she asked, her hands fidgeting with themselves, a cigarette caught somewhere in-between her tangled fingers and long, sparkly pink nails. She sat cross-legged on the rickety rocking chair at the front of our porch, just as I was leaving this town forever.

Once upon a time, my mother was a fabulous debutante, a pageant princess from Las Vegas. Looking at her that last time, I saw how it all had wasted away. Her puffy, glamorous hair had gone wiry and thin, and her porcelain face had cracked and peeled away all the beauty she once had. My mother was a shell of a woman, barely surviving between the desperate gasps of smoke, gin and Xanax.

"Yes," I'd told her, and watched her. She flicked her ash to the floor and poised for another venomous drag of her cigarette, the end stained red from her lipstick.

"Out into the world, yes, I know," she mumbled between gasps of smoke. "Ever since you were a little boy, I could sense nothing would keep you here. Even when you were growing up, you were never in the room. Conversations would pass you by, and you'd be out the window or under the floorboards, in your own head. That's how you failed school. You never want to be where you are, it's always somewhere else, with someone else. You're a wanderer, and whatever it is you're searching for, don't let it destroy you."

"I'll be alright," I whispered. "I have dreams."

"So did I, and look at me now, washed up and pathetic. Men used to come to me, beg to fuck me, to even just kiss me. And so what if I let them? I was beautiful. So beautiful, so beautiful."

"I still think you're beautiful."

"As soon as I had you, I knew it'd all go away. I married your father out of shame. I didn't abort you out of shame. And then he brought me here, that ugly little man. He plucked me away from the cities and the flashing lights, and dragged me to this empty house, only to leave me for his younger, prettier side-piece. He left me to rot in this town. Everything rots here. I'm glad you're getting out. It destroyed all my dreams."