Aw shit, or why I had to add slurpee to my dictionary

I needed a pepsi slurpee. Two martinis at Second City (funny), a drop off at the 7-11 at Bloor and Spadina and I was feeling dehydrated, and there it was. I giggled with Carole the whole subway ride home but I wondered if she noticed me staring at it, brows lightly furrowed, examining the cup, watching the fingerprints melt inward, the brown trickling down like slowmotion guinness, swirling it, sipping again, stopped.

They didn’t taste like my childhood anymore, like dry-hot Edmonton summers, skipping to the plaza, knees knobby and scabbed with a dollar from some relative with less nutritional control than my mother. to get a dilly bar or a slurpee (yes, DQ and 7-11 on the same corner, insane). It felt like a long hike but I went there last summer and it is in fact just around the corner, and neither a DQ or a 7-11 anymore.

No, now pepsi slurpees taste like something else. They taste like you saying I’ll enjoy a trip into the downtown night if I’d just roll off the couch. Me skipping ahead on the way back, slurping, knees knobby and scarred and me being playful just for a moment, just for a glimpse of what might have been. And I wonder if that’s why you take me out into the air, before we’re back in your living room, passing lit things across the table from couch to couch to break the silence. The silence that occurs when there’s nothing left you’re allowed to say. Allowed to say without sounding too this or that, too bold, too much, too simple.

Now pepsi slurpees taste like this and the limbo feels like a hammock underneath me. Rest me softly on something and let the caffeine course through me, sending memories at hyper speed. I want them to burn off faster anyway. But this is how it is, life attaching itself to different things. Slurpees attaching themselves to different things, but maybe that’s fine because the 7-11 isn’t there anymore anyway.