whirred softly, letting in the bright day. I was already on the floor doing my thousand morning sit ups. The gentle sun was embracing me as I did what was required to keep myself in shape.
Tattoos would look rather silly on me if I got fat. I had done most of them myself with a custom made needle and Kuro Sumi ink. It was the only way to be sure it was as safe as possible and that I got exactly what I wanted. Any mistakes that resulted were mine and mine alone.
Standing in the mirror, considering what to put where, I had given a moment’s mad consideration to tattooing GOD across my chest, an absurdist tribute to Kenneth Anger’s infamous LUCIFER tattoo. But that seemed a bit too blasphemous even for a lost lamb such as myself. In the end I had compromised by putting ANGER.
It was no use. I had half hoped that getting Morgan on video link might satisfy my curiosity and allow me to finally get her out of my head so I could focus. In a twist of fate that so often occurs in tales such as this, discovering that she was not only beautiful in a natural way one rarely saw anymore, but also brilliant, did little to quell the fires burning within. If anything, it made them stronger.
I didn’t often dream anymore. My dreams had gone away, which was quite a fight when I was younger. I’d had a bit of an issue with a nightmare disorder as a teen and decided to just end the whole thing. No dreams, no nightmares.
It seemed like a pretty easy equation despite the objections raised by the likes of Freud and Gaiman. I hadn’t had a dream in years until that night. The night I dreamed of Morgan. Even a skeptical such as myself could tell that someone was trying to tell me something.
The music moved my legs like fuel. The connection between mind and body was at a near frightening height. It was the only way to get the blank, the pure white light of peace that invariably came along with a mind truly at ease.
The process was assisted by the adrenaline already pumping through on the course to euphoria. If only it wasn’t for that damn traffic light. Once stopped, I ran into someone I knew, who was trying to say something to me that I couldn’t hear over the sound of the music that had been playing in my headphones as I had been running.
“Sorry?” I asked, instinctively removing an earbud.
“I thought it was you. How long has it been?” she asked rhetorically.
“Depends on who you are,” I teased.
“Y-you don’t remember?” Dallas asked, a tear already threatening to cascade.
“Of course I do, how have you been?”
“Good, I’ve been good,” Dallas said.
The hand going to her black and blond, two-tone bob told me she was lying.
“Everything okay with Jim?”
“Can’t complain,” she said with a shrug.
“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.
“Won’t.”
“As I suspected.”
“I-I just, things didn’t really-”
“Sparrow,” I said, lightly touching her shoulder.
Dallas flinched slightly at the sound of the name I had used for her for years. Mostly because she was tiny and always walking around singing, like a bird. Still, making up nicknames for people wasn’t the strangest thing I had done during my 'odd duck' childhood. If anything, it qualified as comparatively normal. My obsession with corks, however, remained a mystery even to me.
“I’m sorry, I just need-”
“Some coffee,” I said, not meaning it as a question.
One of the advantages to regular runs was that I got to know the immediate area quite well. Such as the fact that the third best café in the city known for its great coffee, in my humble estimation at any rate, was a scant few blocks away. The location came up behind my eyes like a neurological GPS.
“Okay, spill,” I said, setting down the two large mugs on the polished bistro table.
“I guess I’m just kind of in a funk. Most of what I thought I wanted, I don’t want any more and I have no idea what I am going to do or where to start if I did.”
“I think that’s called the quarter life crisis. Tends to happen after college when cold harsh reality sets in after four or more years of safety in a comfortable cocoon,” I said, drawing on perhaps half of my poetic powers.
“I’m pretty far out of college,” Dallas observed.
“It can also happen later. Especially if what one has been