Sporadic Flashbacks

The snow is tumbling down desolate sky in Montreal, latching onto my black overcoat, and I stare at her runny, red nose and it is vibrant and beautiful. And I am nervous and cold with her body under my armpit, embedding herself into me. I chew on the inside of my mouth, biting off pieces of dead skin on my inner left cheek as they latch onto my tongue like leftover bread stuck in my teeth after rubbing incessantly at it with my tongue. I subtlety rub my index against my tongue, pretending to blow warm breaths into my hand, and the dead skin latches on it. I flick the fleck onto the snow.

That was then and now is now, and now I am walking down a street and the air is salt drenched, digging into my lungs and clearing out the leftover nicotine. Old Orchard Beach, Maine. The hotels spread across the ironically titled Canada street, boasting fluttering American, Quebec and Canadian flags. Why even bother with sovereignty when you can drive six hours down south of the border and travel to the french-american invaded colony of Old Orchard Beach. The colonists being mostly above the age of sixty. Even the store-owners are expected to speak french, and it is the only summer vacation spot in the States where french can be seen as the main language during the summer. I have been coerced here the past four years with family for, one month subtracted from my summer vacation.

Perfume lingers in the salty air.

I have had enough of associating ex-girlfriends with their perfume odour, because her vile smell reminds me of that easy girl I went out with in grade seven who gave me head every day and cheated on me every second day. She depresses me.

I walk past the fried dough bakery, among the mortally obese.

It’s a sad thing to think about, what I am thinking about. That every lived experience before this moment is now dead only to be remembered temporarily until forgotten and then death. This motion of strained muscles among the senile, who are in desperate need of a gerontologist is merely a soon to be flash back.

It’s a beautiful day for a parade on an intersecting diner road in a desert. Too bad I am stuck among bulbous males fishing on the beach next to young children. Safety precautions are merely suggestions, after all.

Cracked leather jackets and cigarette packs remind me of my youth, as I go through the hand-me down clothes passed on from my cousin in the duffel bag on the beach. I’d be at my cousins house every weekend and he’d tell me all about his gallivanting, his going out and drinking, his meeting hot blonde girls and taking them back home, his sneaking them through his window which luckily was connected to the balcony in the front of the house. He’d tell me how he’d french kiss them by sticking his tongue in their mouths and then squeeze their breasts. I pretended to act disgusted, embarrassed, but something sparked, a new found knowledge. I began to notice breasts, the girls who were unlucky enough to have them starting to grow early and getting all the attention from older boys. My cousin was the peak of cool.

I haven’t seen him for seven years.

I was driving around downtown one night, back home, and wandering all about the infamous deals going down the alleyways I crossed and watched the drunk girls hug the drunk boys. I walked into a bar on the main and there he is, but he is old, ravaged. He is fat and drunk, greasy. Disgusting. Yelling at the young girls as they laugh at him walking by him. Six empty beer glasses in front of him, haggling the bar-maid for another.

He is greasy.

"You're finished for the night, bud."
"I'm finished!"

Now is now and I am on the beach and I am alone and I am lost within my mind while the sun sets, dies, which emphatically symbolizes the death of something or other in most classical literature.