she loved to smoke on her bike. the way smoke flew past her face as she raced down some neighborhood street. as long as she didn’t have to stop as some arbitrary sign, or unnecessary light and grab the cigarette with a gloved hand, the experience rivaled magic, like real live magic. But a stop sign, that could ruin the whole current. She would have to take the ciggy out of her mouth, stop the flow of tobacco into her lungs, her gloves would smell like old smoke for the next few rides. The peaks and troughs of the exploit as a whole.

More than once she gave me the spiel. The meaning to life. Different words, same meaning. I’ll never know, only that the radio will remind me occasionally, I’ll be there and hear her saying words into the wind, behind me trying to tell me her prayers from the bike lane. I don’t know the words, I just know how I feel now. The words I sing into the rush of it all. My mantra. Oh na na na na na. Sing when you ride, she told me. Pick a song and scream it. Only because you know that the same people will live there tomorrow. The same people who live there today, who sit behind curtains patterned with lotus’ and baby herons. Maybe they hear you, maybe only you hear you. Maybe you flatter yourself to think anyone ever hears you. Maybe you need to shut the fuck up because people don’t want to hear you. Make your noise, and make it how you want to.

Little boys still pushin big wheels, stack my money lay low and chill. Is that what gets you? Let it get you. Why do you fight it? Don’t fight it. You know it fills you, makes you want to dance like Jr. High, makes you want to be a twelve year old girl and surrounded by sweaty twelve year old boys in wife beaters takin their shirts off and wavin‘em round their heads like a helicopta. The twelve year old in me thinks the twenty four year old in me is a joke. You didn’t want to be a pre-teen when you were a pre-teen, why do you think that is a good age now? At the time ninety percent of your thoughts were themed by discontent and unhappiness.

You couldn’t wait to reach a double digit that meant something, become a teen, thirteen, sixteen, eighteen, something that had weight, something that mattered. Twenty one was a million miles away. Then all of a sudden you are twenty four with an expired drivers lisence, living out of state to avoid your parking tickets, using a passport to drink beer in between reading assignments and the Thong Song comes on some bartenders i-pod mix and you nearly shit your pants yearning for seventh grade. Oh the beauty of humanity, of consciousness, of mortality. Go ride your bike home with a cigarette stuck between your twenty four year old lips, filling your hair with smoke, your hood with ash. Go fall asleep in the shower. Wake up when the water turns cold. Go grow up. Never grow up.

a