Its two o’clock in the morning now. I’m still standing outside in front of Kyla’s house, shivering in the frigid darkness. Everybody else, Skinny, Ricky, my sisters - they’ve all long gone home.  I spark up the spliff again, the one that (I dreamed) is supposed to bring Kyla and me together, on that special trip. I take a hit and put it out again. I’ve been repeating this same motion for the last hour and a half. Sparking up, greedily, frantically inhaling two or three tokes, coughing, spitting, and putting it out. Sitting on the curb, getting up, pacing the frozen tar, back to sitting on the curb again.  Again and again. Nothing. It’s not giving me nothing. The comfort, the carefree feeling I crave, never comes back to me. Only paranoia, fear, and anxiety reign. I look down at the tiny roach that remains of my jay, a reminder of what I feel like - a tiny roach.  And I don’t even have my roach clip with me. It also reminds me that just as the roach signifies the end of a joint, it also signifies the end of a part of my life. Both of the girls I have totally idolized, of whom I’ve somehow attached a significant aspect and meaning of life to, have basically rejected me. That is the cold, raw truth of the matter. Then I realize that this also is just an illusion. My illusion. Kyla made her choice a while ago. And she chose Skinny. I wonder if maybe the main reason that I idolize Kyla is, because, on some level, I know (or feel) that being with her will give me a kind of legitimacy?  Or, at least, maybe a sort of warmer, more comfortable, and safer path? A type of My Three Sons life, that I alternately despise and desire. As opposed to the other road that I might be embarking on. The Esperanza road. The Na-Na road. The artist road. Free-falling, chaotic, open, unknown, and potentially terrifying. And, even though it appears that we all   had such a great time tonight at the Park Theater…like it was old times, actually, I’m more cut-off from my family, my cousins, than ever before. Because, really, I’d been kind of using them. Plotting against my own cousin, Skinny, to get at Kyla. The paranoia makes me even more paranoid. Now I’m feeling paranoid about being paranoid.

Holy Shit!

This isn’t paranoia. This is lucidity. Total fucking lucidity. Hard insight. And this realization seeps into the marrow of my bones, seeps in like a bitter cough medicine that clears away the congestion. It shakes me, terrifies me, till I don’t want to leave that curb, that street. I don’t want to go home, and face the fact that I’m nowhere, floating between two worlds.