CARRY ME HOME - PART 1: OPENING
It was Harper who came up with the idea. She picked me up the morning of graduation and said, “Let’s get tattoos.”
I had never wanted a tattoo, so I just shrugged. She drove to Deion’s and he sat in the back, twirling a cigarette between dark fingers. He didn’t object to a tattoo, so their enthusiasm overruled my concerns.
She had already made an appointment for the three of us at a local hole in the wall tattoo parlor. I don’t think she would have taken no for an answer, but that was her way. As we sat in the lobby, we bandied about ideas, keeping in mind that we only had maybe a hundred dollars to spend.
At first we made jokes and awful suggestions, to relieve the nervous pressure. Finally we quieted down, and Harper stared at the wall full of pre-designed tattoos. I gazed at her, wishing then I could just have a tattoo of her, so that way she could never leave me.
Deion was looking at her too, probably thinking the same thing I was. It was an unspoken thing between him and I. Neither of us had had Harper up to that point, and I didn’t think either of us ever would. If either of us did while the other was still alive, it would rip apart our friendship. So Deion and I agreed, in the unconscious way men do, to leave it all alone.
“I’ve got it,” Harper said. “Swallows.”
“Swallows?” Deion looked at the wall now, trying to find what she had picked out.
“I read once,” she said, “that sailors would get tattoos of swallows as a good luck charm, so that way they would find their way home from sea.”
Not that Harper couldn’t be deep when she wanted to be, she was the smartest person I knew, but the profundity of her simple suggestion shocked Deion and I. We agreed instantly, just as a burly and heavily tattooed man walked up and said it was our turn.
A couple hours later we all stumbled out of the parlor, feeling the ache of the identical swallows we had all branded to our collarbone. We suddenly felt very adult.
Graduation was long and uneventful. Those chosen to speak each gave a long and boring speech about the future, about what we, the collective we, could accomplish if only we, collective we, tried. I looked down my aisle towards Harper, and we shared a grimace. I remembered then a couple years before when we first met and bonded over our similar hatred of pontificating. It was all so narcissistic. Speeches were vocal masturbation.
Finally it was all over, and after an eternity of photos and fawning parents, though only Harper’s mother was there, the three of us escaped to party for the first time as free people.
It wasn’t strictly true to say we were free. I was still going to college, a local one that Harper mocked me relentlessly for not having the courage to look beyond the horizon. Deion, for some inexplicable reason, had joined the army and was due to ship out in October. Harper was secretive about her own plans.
We rode in Harper’s car out to the hills that rolled into the sea outside town, and set up a little campground. In the trunk of her car was a stock of alcohol, pot, and other things. We put on some music, some Kanye and Outkast, and TI and anything else we could think of, and drank and smoked and danced.
Sometime in the middle of the night, when it should have been pitchblack, Harper set off the first flare. It flew up into the air, turning the fog a lurid pink. We laughed and laughed at this effect, and soon Deion and I were both shooting off flares too, red and green and blue, and the sky was giving off a kind of ghoulish light that might have been frightening any other time. It seemed then, looking back at it now, that we were in the middle of a grand parade, as these marching bands passed, following oversized floats, and there was this cheering as Harper, Deion, and I all dancer our minds out. Of course there was no one else there, but that’s what I remember.
Finally we all fell asleep, and woke up to a cold morning, with the sun trying to overcome the hills in the east, casting everything in a sickly yellow light. I sat up, the first to wake. Harper had falled asleep with her head in my lap, and I looked down at her then, calm and controlled, and stroked her hair, and loved her then more than I had ever before. Deion was asleep, to, so this would be mine forever, and I never wanted it to end. I imagined then that she’d wake up to my touch, and she’d look up into my eyes, and she would kiss me and I would kiss her back, all under the grey slate sky.
But she stirred then, and sat up, rubbing her eyes. She didn’t smear her makeup because she didn’t need any, and she was more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen before. She looked to me, then to the sea, and said, “I need to go.”
