to byron

On the way up, I met a girl with a streak of pink in her hair and a Siren Studios Hollywood shirt – we were introduced by a man I later found out she didn’t really know, who she called a weirdo, I said “he seemed nice enough,” and then a pervert – and we only spoke briefly, while boarding a north-bound train, she to Modesto and me to Byron, CA., about the breeze and the bad shit she’d been into before in Modesto. “Real bad shit,” she said. I wanted to talk to her more, and look at her more closely, study the way her eyes were. But then she put on sunglasses and I sat far away from her; I can’t forget, I’m the outsider, I’ve got to perpetuate that. Because I have to. We rode for hours, and suddenly I realized we were twenty minutes past Modesto, and, well, she’d be gone.