Burnt Memories

My parents have left for the weekend. With the house keys still dangling from my fingertips as their car rolls down the street, deviously I smile.

It’s either going to be an orgy or a party at Chez Moi this weekend, and with the likelihood of an orgy resting almost at zero, a party seems most likely.

As I re-enter my house, it’s almost as if passing through the door is passing through memory;

I see my floor covered with a hundred pairs of shoes, the stench of pot physically assaulting me. It doesn’t matter, the floors bouncing up and down like a rambunctious meth-addict after visiting ‘Sugar Mountain’; I’m not even sure if its the music, dancing, or the drugs that’s doing it, but it still looks pretty cool.

I walk down the halls of memory lane, and see my friends and I sitting on the floor of my kitchen, long after we had had to call the cops to clear the place out. My one friend is playing with a lighter and ignites the noise violation absently.

‘So, whatcha’ gonna’ do when that burns down to your finger tips?’

As the leaf-like sheet falls to the floor, I see through time and memory to the burn mark that is still there, and the mental vacation that my friends and I have received from parental desertion over the years. In this case, ‘desertion’ is sweet, creating a recess that has been filled up with memories forged by our own initiatives. What look like intentionally planned photographs of action series shots of myself or my friends upchucking after hitting the century club (like most of our ancestors, we too, did not quite make it a full century), or in the rock star days of when friends’ bands would spawn all night after parties where club owners would drunkenly suck on my nipples in front of everyone (that was really, really awkward, and only mildly arousing), and if you weren’t rocking out, you were simply just out.

Run-ins with the law. Jealous arguments. Loud, sloppy, coitus interruptus. Jokes, drunks, and jerks. Party hopping, dance-floor shredding, speaker blasting loud.

All that’s left to decide is how many people I’m going to call this time, and what all I need to get to drink.