“For the first five years of my life, I was a nudist,” is what Adelaide’s opening line of her college application read. I wish I could have thought of that. Adelaide is my roommate Ava’s younger sister. I’m not sure if I am in love with Ava or not. Her beauty outclasses Adelaide, although she disagrees, regardless of her constant comments about Adelaide’s insecurities. Ava’s understanding of getting what she wants by sweetening a sentence with her rather bright eyes are not yet Adelaide’s forte, but the analytical nuance of Ava will never leave her; only three years ago she only smiled with deceit and trudged through her private school hall’s trenches, void of the substances that will come to haunt her when her second child is diagnosed with dyslexia. Unlike her sister, Adelaide’s solution is not one of excess and miscalculation. Their mother’s name is Amy. Amy has told her husband she has a crush on me. She was the proponent for her daughters to have the names that they do. Ava lives up to the first letter of the 26, but Adelaide wouldn’t mind if her name was Xenia.
When Adelaide went north, I think I fell in love with her and her words. After two hours of my supposed melancholic past exposing my charlatanism, Adelaide told me,
“You should read Bukowski. I think that’s like what writing is. Alcoholics who are like pouring their heart out.”
I was shocked that someone whose vernacular was so filled with “like” was aware of the author of Post Office. I poured ourselves another wine.
“Never heard of him.”
That didn’t work. Adelaide had already picked up on my facetious tendencies.
“You’ve read him, haven’t you?”
“Possibly.”
“There’s just this inherent personality that he’s able to get across and it makes his assholism somehow relatable.”
Assholism. When I reminisce about my misfortunes and minor successes, my disenchanted path with Adelaide certainly begins here.
“I write poetry sometimes, but like, I’m not always too sure of it, even though it’s so natural for me.”
Adelaide’s poetry was far from misguided. On paper, she is quick, full of character, wit, and charisma. Unlike mine, her word choice is flowery and possesses a feminine mystique to her idea of blunt eloquence that I will never be able to achieve, no matter how much of my own eyeshadow smears my pillowcase. Her words go down more sensually than the absinthe Anais and I shared and are more alluring than the fruit Adam couldn’t pass up.
Adelaide and I retreated to a room I still cannot call home. She must have had no capacity for serenity or complacency that night.
“I grow impatient for my fucking whiskey!”
“All I have is gin, Adelaide.”
“Next time, that won’t do.”
Trouble seems to love me in a way that most never could.
Jonny Samuels is a third year student at the University of San Francisco. He is not an English major, although he prides himself on his ability to adhere to anti-philistine tendencies. His Instagram @junewitherrs, is littered with semi-embellished accounts of the life he wishes he never had.
