Dating Up Under A World Without Oil

[A Post for World Without Oil]

So, he asked, steering down 9th Ave, What kind of car do you drive?

A Honda Civic, I answered a bit tightly, since I've always been a bit embarrassed by its typically unwashed, slightly dented appearance.  With the ski rack on top I never bother to remove off-season.  And now for other reasons too (but it was evening!  Though I *am* used to biking this far by now, it was either go by car or don't go out at all, if I wanted to get home alive...)  It should be up on the left, on this block or the next.

A Honda Civic? he repeated. Do you feel superior to me for driving a car with better fuel mileage? he asked with an edge of snarkiness.  Until then I'd studiously tried to ignore the guzzling gigantism of his ride.   I've never been a huge moralist about SUV's-- I had always regarded their owners through a Buddhist lens as being unskillful in their choice (in laymen's terms, making a dumbass mistake with their money), not through a Judeochristian lens of they deserve to be witch-hunted.   But I had marveled a time or two-- at seven dollars a gallon, he can still afford...?

The air was hanging with my pause. How to reply to this kind of gauche comment?  Nooo... No, I feel superior to you for better reasons than that-- I've never made a friend sleep on top of a pool table, for one thing. 

Phew.  Sarcasm was much safer territory.  Made me feel like I was still in college, still wrapped up in a safety blanket of a-responsibility.  The pool-table-sleeping friend guffawed from his shotgun seat-- She's got you there, bud.

When I had joined my date and his friend at the club late last night, they were near the end of a day long drinking blitz, too drunk for either to drive back to the 'burbs.  So we'd hailed a cab (at $14 minimum! Glad I wasn't paying...) to the downtown studio my date and his friends rented for their artistic dabblings.  Gosh, I feel embarrassed just typing that.  I feel suddenly implicated in their world, so close to broken down restaurants and pot-holed streets.  Is it my world, just for being a visitor there?  I guess it's all my world, when it comes down to it... This has all developed so fast, while I was in the midst of finals, that I haven't had a chance to really process the contradicting trajectories of my life and um, the rest of the world. 

But tut tut, get back to the diary.  The studio had one lone couch, which Mr. X graciously offered to me.  To the friend, as mentioned, he offered the pool table.  For himself, he had elected the third worst spot-- a wooden church pew (god knows where twentysomething men with frivolous energy to spare find their decorating schemes). 

But I had insisted: No, come on, I won't let you do that, it's not right.  You can fit on the couch.  And with a bit of squirming and squishing he did.  We slept in opposite directions, his hands tucked between my knees.  It was cuddly.  It was pleasant.

Until the church pew got in my eyes.  The stupid moonlight refracted into my face, at some ungodly hour.  I startled, and tugged the boy's jacket higher over my brows.   Then sank back into half-sleep.  My consciousness slipped, but the church pew kept glaring in my mind's eye.  And then multiplied into a haze of pews, into whole churches.  Filled with bums, only when I looked closer I realized they were people I'd seen earlier in the evening.  Our cab driver, with ebony skin blending into the shadows, the bouncers, the women with the designer dresses.  They were piling up on the pews, hugging every inch of wood, like it gave them sustenance.  As I flowed closer, I saw more clearly: they were sucking the wood, mouths gaping, turning black as ink.  As oil.  When their mouths were no longer enough, they developed suckers on their fingers, on their thighs.  The pews were sagging, the walls above were swaying and I started to cry out---

And I breathed in, bolt upright, as the outlines of the room-- the real room-- and the boy, manifested themselves.   The boy leaned over and swung his legs around, and pressed his cheek against mine.  We kissed, and kissed, and I calmed. 

We never once mentioned the havoc overtaking our country, our city, that whole night, or that whole ride to 9th Ave.  I don't know whose fault that was, if it was anyone's.  I've been hashing this out with my friends, you know, once I woke up from finals and realized the severity of what's going on.  But... well, for all I know this is a temporary association.  Who knows were we-- or the world-- will be at when I get back from my summer abroad?  No need to get all issues-heavy.  I mean, I think I'm making it sound worse than it is-- in his defense, the benefit he was coming from was for green energy for chrissakes. 

Gah, I'm so aswhirl inside.  I'm making excuses, for him, and myself, and making assumptions...

It's just so, so hard to process these changes going on, when I'm about to leave the country (thank god I booked my tickets months ago).   Things haven't really hit my immediate family yet-- well, besides the fear-- so I'm not at the point of changing my plans.  I may even be better off over there-- Vietnam is a developing country, so it'll be much cheaper to live over there.  Better than being a burden on my family back here.  (And it would take me a lot more than $7 a gallon to get me to tolerate living with my anxiety-attacked mother!)  As long as I change currency right away once I land, I should be insulated from shocks to the dollar for the duration of my time there.  I don't know.   Maybe this is a bad decision.  But really, is there _anywhere_ that's safe, now?  It's all a gamble.

So I gamble with continuing my life as it is, for now.