the game of chicken

Thursday there was a text, another observation, tidy and perfunctory, transportive. I stood on that corner once, just recently, so I went back to that day, when I waited for him to pick me up to drive me to the place he didn't want me to wander around, and I tried to remember if it smelled like anything that day.

It was just beginning to rain and the sky had that heavy humid iron smell and the rain drops were bigger and landed with a heavy splat! on my skin and t-shirt. And in my memory that is all I can bring back, is the smell of the rain in the summer, mixed with a thousand beakers of humidity and sucking blood out of a wound in a finger.

And so thoroughly did he move me, inspire me, impress me that there around me the walls began a quick crumble, the rocks began to fall in great heavy clumps, I turned and it was descending, like a building being demolished by bombs, like the building had knees that didn't exist before and it cracked in the middle and fell.

Yet still, I hesitated, still I let the bitterness of what's past swallow me and demand my silence, which I gave without struggle.

Then she intervened and suggested the invitation. I am so thoroughly repelled by them in general and don't consider the random texter a prospect (some loser I had the good sense to delete a while ago, um, yeah, how exciting?); I hadn't considered inviting him. So I did, just to see what the answer would be, to see if I could flush out the clues to end the mystery and I referenced his other half (the guitar he plays so well) so that if it is not the singer that is randomly texting me, they would immediately object this reference to an instrument they do not play.

I got nothing. Not a no, not a yes, not a word for a full day, nothing.

Of course, there is a worry that maybe it is not the singer and some random stranger who I once knew will wander into my home tomorrow night and I will have a choice to make about this person I hadn't considered before and hoped to never see again.

Or no one will show up and the bluff will be called, and then it will be hard to admit to not being the fool.

update: 8/2 no one showed...so, the mystery continues...