drunk walk home / zori

Leland Durrow

I should have known better than to follow her.

She’d taken off just like a few nights ago, out the front door in a huff. Didn’t give me a second thought, didn’t think about her family, just went on living like nobody else in her life ever mattered. That was Birdie Hope’s whole act, a one-woman-show where at the end, you weren’t sure if you were supposed to clap, or call the police about a woman who seemed like she was about to jump from the roof. Like mother, like daughter. (No, I don’t believe that.)

When I’d invited her the other night, I’d expected that she’d wait until Arg and I had finished playing before jumping off the deep end. It was supposed to be a way for her to leave the house. She’d get out all her hysterics, or maybe, if she’d been in a better mood, she’d have actually wanted to have a few drinks with us and shoot some darts. Maybe razz Arg for his whiny little voice and tell me I needed to be steadier through the chorus. We used to be fun, though I’m not sure if I even believe that anymore. We’d do the sort of casual drinking that led to slow dancing to old contraband and swinging around to the late-night burger joint to sober up before the long walk home.

“Would you fucking slow down?” She didn’t let up and I tried not to raise my voice, but you know how hard it is. Especially when she wants to make a fucking point of some kind and brings up the drama tenfold. Sometimes I think the cry for attention’s the only thing she lives for anymore, so that way at least some of us still know she exists.

‘Get away from me.’ Fat fucking chance.

‘You don’t get to bitch at me and then follow me out like a lost fucking puppy. Go home.’

Why was I even following her?

Shauna would’ve come right over if I told her I wanted her back. How was this even worth it? Every time things went tits up with Birdie, she tried as hard as humanly possible to make me feel like shit.

Yeah, I’d knock that guy the fuck out. Wherever that little bitch was from, I bet he isn’t going to forget the hospitality eight showed him. And yeah, maybe he shouldn’t have been hitting on her like that. He also should've known to keep his mouth shut, talking about how I played the guitar. Holding hands with Birdie and buying her drinks (she always had guys buy her drinks, come on).

Can you blame me for hitting him in his smug fucking face?

She apparently could.

Guys like that swept in and saw a woman like Birdie and thought she’d get one good night with them. Some short, skinny little runt from eleven, he probably had a little dick and cried during sex. I should’ve let her go home with him and be disappointed.

Except she did go home – left with him – and still was mad at me. I hadn’t even really meant to hit him, but he’d pushed me back and I’d already had at least six beers so maybe I let him get the better of me.

“Don’t do this Birdie.” It was best to try and talk her down from the ledge before she even got up there.

‘And for the record, I can cut you out of whatever the fuck I want.’

A black cloud lifted up into the sky in the distance, and I remembered half the reason I’d followed her home. Something was happening in eight, and Birdie was going home to lock herself away from anyone that might know what the hell was going on. What, was Blackston going to stop someone from breaking down the door? Those noodle arms?

‘This is my family. You couldn’t even be bothered to marry me, so there’s nothing here for you. Whatever you think you’re a part of because of our daughter is over. It’s gone. She’s dead.’

The streetlights stutter out and leave us in darkness.

“Do you know how crazy you fucking sound? Marry you? Really Birdie? Since when did you become an advocate for the sanctity of marriage?” But that wasn’t the point. She’d never wanted to be married to me, at least not in almost twenty years. “You want me to say I want this to be over?”

I took off my beanie and swung my arms around because I couldn’t help but talk with my hands, especially after all of this nonsense.

“I’ve wanted this to be over a hundred times. You think I like watching some guy all over you and then you acting like there’s nothing here? It’s a mind flip trying to keep up with you.” Even if I’d never done a damn thing, there probably were a hundred different ways she’d have told me how I ruined the night.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay because something just blew the fuck up. Out there,” I waved my arms in the direction of where there’d been a cloud of smoke. It all sounds a lot stupider out loud. “Because of who knows what. I care about you.”

Leland Durrow
*

Looking at Birdie stagger along, me dragging my feet behind her, it was like someone had laid down a strip of film and spun us in a circle. Over and over, me chasing her, sometimes the reverse, neither one of us ever stepping out of frame. She had her lonely life in the little house with the faded siding and a cat, and that should have been enough.

I could’ve stayed away from her and not cared if the whole thing collapsed down on her one day, like the smoke tumbling up from the building in the distance. She’d get a neat little obituary and a packed viewing, even if none of the Hopes bothered to see her when she was still alive.

‘I don’t believe you. You don’t get to say you care about me and then treat me the way you do.’

Something about the cold of the January finally set a chill across my face. I exhaled out of my nose, and let the steam collect in front of my face. I wanted to tell her she could go to hell. Fuck her, you know? Getting to fly off the handle at everyone for the least little thing, and throw herself down a set of stairs because she got too drunk, as though she lived her life like she had any sort of control. She didn’t even work, she just sat around her house all day with her cat waiting for something to happen. As though Birdie didn’t know that she could make anything happen if she just managed not to accuse everyone and anything of being out to get her.

But she couldn’t do that. Couldn’t let go of the past and she couldn’t even let anyone else get close to her, not unless they didn’t mean to spend more than a night or a morning, or hell, maybe it was an afternoon for her to fuck them in the shower, I don’t know. I think she liked the fact that she could be used by so many people because at least it made her feel as though she served some sort of purpose.

‘Clearly, I drive you insane, and you absolutely fucking hate me, so we don’t have to do this! You can go live your incredible bachelor life and I’ll go kill myself before I turn forty. Would that be good for you?’

I had to roll my eyes.

At least with Damaris and her depression she didn’t go and threaten to kill herself all the time. No, Birdie Hope got up on her hind legs and barked at the rest of us how she was going to really do it this time! Everyone, this was it! She was going to fucking pull the trigger and leave the rest of us all alone, and wouldn’t we be so fucking sorry?

I never believed it, not when she said the quiet part out loud. She’d rather kill herself if it meant one of us would be apart from the other. But she knew that I was coming back, tail between my legs.

Like always.

‘Since you want this to be over so bad, it shouldn’t matter who I sleep with. I didn’t even sleep with Vasco. I’ve slept with a whole lot of other men, though. I don’t know why it’s any of your business.’

“That’s not the point!” I shouldn’t have yelled, but the words echoed across the empty street, and I had to stop myself from clenching both my fists together. “That’s not the point.” I repeated myself, all the edges softened.

It would never be about all the different men that she could be with. It wasn’t that she and the little pipsqueak at the bar could’ve gone home and raw dogged ten times. But why did she get to act as though she could show that sort of thing to other people who were barely in frame for an instant? Maybe I’d had a few shots when I’d see them next to each other, the way she’d smiled, or how he’d been watching her watching me. As though there was a little bit of a spark there, one that could’ve taken that dried up kindling and set it all on fire.

And then maybe one of these days she’d turn back around, instead of running away, and there wouldn’t be any anger. There wouldn’t be any carrying on, no swearing or telling me she was going to take her own life. She’d tell me that everything was just fine, that I didn’t need to worry about her.

Would we even want to remember each other by then?

She staggered a few more steps and went down, hand against the wall, face forward. She puked up across the pavement, the liquid scattering along the concrete.

We were a few blocks from her house, and by now, I could’ve left her to fend for herself. I’d seen her in rough shape before, and it’s not like the bear trap of a brain she had wouldn’t get her back home.

I’d get back to my place and Argyle and I could drink until we were cross eyed and wake up the next morning without ever having to think about the Hopes again. Call up Shauna and start something in earnest.

“Hey! Hey.” I took off my coat to set it on the pavement and moved down into a crouch next to her. I brushed back her hair and put a hand in the space between her shoulder blades. “Easy there, tiger.”

“I’m still here, Birdie.” I rubbed along her back in soft circles, and craned in close. “I don’t want this to be over. I don’t… I want us to be better but we’re fucked up. And every time I want you to be with me I feel like you don’t really want me to be there. And maybe sometimes I do that to you, too.”

Out here on the street scrambled in vomit and my own head swimming from the cocktails that evening, I guess I found some sort of truth. Or courage.

“But then there’s the part of me that wants you next to me all the time. You don’t have to believe in me, but maybe… just believe me?”

I grabbed my jacket and put it over her shoulders.

“I don’t want to spend the night alone. And you shouldn’t, either.”

Come Downstairs and Say Hello, Guster

Leland Durrow

I watched her hair cascade down over her shoulders, and the pale white of her cheeks in the cold of the winter air. All the fire that burned through Birdie Hope extinguished to reveal the empty surface underneath.

‘You don’t want me. Nobody wants me.’ Birdie slurred out.

I sat there, arm over her back and hand gripped holding onto her shoulder, Birdie pressed close against me and I turned toward her, trying to find the right words to say.

When I was a kid, when I’d look at Birdie and want her to want me in the way that all idiot kids do – the sort of, make your heart flutter just because we held onto each other – I’d thought we could make it through on guts and glory alone. That saying I love you was the same as goodbye, because it was a promise. That when we’d had Damaris and the whole world seemed to shift off its axis and I had to get a job and put on big boy pants, that saying I love you felt more like a secret. Something we shared when things got rough, when we were awake at three in the morning and Damaris was crying again, and we were both so tired I would roll over and pretend to still be asleep.

And when she grew up, I got to say I love you all over again, to someone new who seemed to need it a lot more than Birdie. That the little fights over being out too late to me not taking things seriously, I could still say I love you to Damaris and mean it in the way that it felt like my whole heart was better when Dam said it back. Felt genuine. Not when I looked at Birdie across the dinner table through the quiet, or after we’d sniped at each other, and forgot what those three words even were.

You begin to not love another person and you don’t even realize how you’re weaponizing the words. I love you, you could say with so little emotion walking out the front door that it rang out all hollow. You could shout, I love you! at the top of your lungs in the living room trying to explain yourself for the hundredth time even though you really didn’t, it was just filler. A place to put your anger to make it palatable so you didn’t tell the other person to go jump off a fucking bridge already instead.

‘I know you’re saying it but I don’t know how to make you act like it. I don’t— fuck, Leland.’ She had every right to question me.

I could chew it up and think about saying, I loved you, because it’s a memory then, for two people who walked through to the other side and couldn’t feel an ounce of it for one another anymore.

Other folks seemed to romanticize it like wistful bullshit. That what we’d done to one another hadn’t royally fucked up what we’d hoped to make. That I hadn’t chipped away at her and she hadn’t swung an axe at me, as though a kiss on her forehead and brushing her hair back so vomit didn’t get stuck was going to solve for the mess we’d made.

Birdie hadn’t been wrong. I didn’t want her for a long while, not for more than the time we could spend wrapped around one another. Not when things got hard, with a child who thought she was unlovable. When I didn’t think I was loved, either – so I started looking everywhere else.

‘We really are fucked up, aren’t we?’

I nodded. I couldn’t bother to look her in the eye, low as my stomach felt. Were we really these people? Maybe I’d been holding onto her for so long, I didn’t want to see what it would mean if we really weren’t together anymore. We got through the worst of the grief but we hadn’t ever found one another again, and – I still couldn’t stop wanting to be here in this same spot, over and over again. Cleaning her up from a mess that I’d decided was worth making.

‘Let’s just go home, okay? Let’s go home. I don’t want you to go, I— I never wanted you to go. Maybe if we’d just talked about it like adults, we would’ve known. I don’t know. We can be really stupid sometimes.’

There’s a change in how she spoke, almost sort of tired. Forgiving? I didn’t know if it was worse than what she’d said before, the sort of admission of what we both knew was true: our own stupid fucking pettiness stopped either of us from being happy. And we both seemed to revel in making each other miserable.

'I’m sorry for yelling. Let’s just go. Can you help me up, please?'

“Okay.” My voice came out hoarse, part from the cold, but more from the shouting. I started to take her hands in mine, and stood, slowly at first, so that the both of us could gain our balance. “Take a minute, with me.”

I didn’t feel like running. I couldn’t leave her alone like this, and I owed her more than the sort of goodbye that’d fade from memory by morning. She deserved more than me, too.

“You’re right about us. How we were.” I leaned in closer. “You got the raw end of the deal with me. I should’ve been there and I wasn’t… and now I guess I want to be, but – I don’t know, I don’t think I know how to be with you.”

And it’s not an excuse for all the things I’ve done, all of my own baggage. But I thought it was true, I didn’t know how to balance with Birdie Hope.

“Let me take you back, get you home safe.” I shivered in the cold without my coat, but I didn’t mind how it looked on her.

“I’m sorry. For not making you feel that I wanted you around.” I wiped a hand across my nose. “You deserve to be wanted, Birdie. And I know it sounds like I’m just saying that which – fair. I wouldn’t believe me, either. But I love you, Birdie.”