Fire and Rain [🗸]

26. vendors and eyeliner

MUSIC INTERTWINES WITH STREET FOOD to create a cacophony of flavor.

After having talked to Zahra, a little weight was lifted off my chest. Breathing isn't impossible now. There's still the looming reality of having to go back to Greenport and talk to my parents and debate coming out to them just so that I can breathe a little, but it's not overwhelming.

This time, the moments stop being stolen away from me. I can feel the summer going, so I don't try and grab onto the tails of its dress and attempt to hang on. Instead, I feel everything: I feel the despair and the nostalgia and the joy and the anger and the anxiety.

I feel it all, at one hundred. And sometimes, I feel it at twenty percent or fifty percent, and other times I'm drowned with one feeling over the other. All the time, I let all the feelings happen. And my girlfriend is there, sitting next to me, allowing me to feel it all.

It's been an eventful day. Rayne took us to another roller derby game, and the energy was just as rough-and-tumble as it was the first time they took us to one. If I could skate for shit, I would want to do this sport.

There's something alluring about the way no one seems afraid to rush forward and push past their opponents. There's aggression, but there are also loud laughs and grins after a round is over. 

After the roller derby game, we decided to grab some food from street vendors. Roast pork sandwiches, tomato pie and hoagies. We lean against the wall outside of a store, diving into our food until the salty storeowner threatens to call the cops on us for loitering.

We do, however, get the memo and find a park where we settle on a bench and on the long stalks of grass rising from the ground.

"What the fuck is loitering?" Rayne suddenly asks. I can tell it's a semi-rhetorical question. "Like, how do you get arrested for literally just standing there?"

Elliot's laying by their legs, knees up in the air as he takes a bite out of his hoagie. "I think they just make shit up to harass people, at this point."

"Nah," Azul says, lips cracking into a grin. "Can you imagine having a policeman walk up to you, and the storeowner has to bitch about the fact that you were 'standing outside for too long'?"

It was definitely some wild shit. We laugh a little bit as we 'loiter' freely in the center of the relatively empty park, our conversation shifting every so often to a new topic after having done our fair share of ranting over how dumb the concept of 'loitering' is.

It's 3:00 in the afternoon once we've finished our food, we pack up and walk along the sidewalk for a bit, talking about little things, Zahra's hand slipping into mine as we swing out interlocked hands back and forth.

It's  the second last day before we leave Philly and shit, I know I'm going to miss everything about this city from Rayne to cheesesteaks to dumb historical monuments and makeshift tours.