I remember a lot of things this time of year. After so long, I suppose I always will. Can’t say I’m sad about it. That would be a lie.

I don’t lie.

//

This all may be confusing because it’s not true.

I don’t ever know where to sit. I walk into this room and there’s people all around me, some on stools, some standing, and I’m like “hey man, whatever” and I go to lean up against the north wall. She comes up to me and starts to ask questions sensitive to my integrity and for each one I answer, she rewards me with a cigarette.

These are currency in prison, you know, I tell her and she says hey, I haven’t asked you anything about that yet and I hand her back a cigarette in response. I wasn’t in prison, never planned to be – I’ve probably just committed some sort of convict faux pas that would get me shanked. She looks somewhere between laughter and bourbon and she sticks the cigarette behind her ear like an artist does with his favorite pencil. I keep on leaning against the wall and she looks like she doesn’t know where to sit down, so I smile a little bit around my sigarettea in response to her akimbo.

So tell me about prison, huh, and I shrug my shoulders – she asks me what I used to spend my cigarettes on and I say protein shakes, prison food sucks, ya’know? ‘S unhealthy; protein shakes have full spectrum whey peptides™, taurine, l-leucine, l-phenylalanine, lecithin, glutasynth™ (l-glutamine, oligofructose, glutamine peptides) for starters. She folds her arms over her chest like she doesn’t believe me - I shrug again at her muttered “they’re all-purpose, huh” and well, I reply, I really didn’t get drunk off of them so I guess they aren’t really all-purpose. She nods like I’ve said something profound and I continue to lean against the wall, counting the number of fingertip spans from her nose to her lips, from her lips to her jawline. I’m sort of an artist, you see. I kind of do this to everyone without thinking – plastering my hands across them if I can’t get an accurate read off of just visualization. Sometime it makes people run and sometimes it gets me invited over for the night.

You’re looking at me funny, she says and I nod because I probably am and tell her that the cigarette hanging out of the left side of her mouth spoils her symmetry – symmetry is a sign of beauty. Shrinks run all these tests, right? One of ‘em proves that people who have asymmetrical features are basically treated like dirt. The most common complaint about a botched plastic surgery job is that half of the nose is a millimeter more to the right than the left boob is a little larger than the right eye seems a scant bit puffier than the left.

She glares at me; you learn that in con school or something? And I’m like “no man, no”, pushing myself up off against the wall and walking towards the door – for the life of me, I don’t ever know where to sit. It’s just something about human nature, if your right side doesn’t match your outside, people don’t care to know you.

And I walk out the door.