the habit of being

There is a certain way in which neon liquor store signs are my sirens.

From way on up the road they’ll start beckoning, promising cheap neon beer and Bottles and Bottles and brown paper bags, and I can feel my chromosomes tugging. Sometimes I’ll point them out, count them one by one, in my head or to Someone. There’s one and there’s one and there’s one - all the same, strange-garbed lighthouses in the concrete ocean of City. These are the ports of call. If I could drink the chemical light from the signs themselves, I would, carefully. I’d suck the glow out like steamed milk through a straw, silencing the street song forever.

They won’t even let me inside, but there are such nights I’d be happy just to curl up in the doorway and look at them - all the colors and numbers and kinds. Rows and rows of Bottles. The ugly flourescent lights. The ugly tile floors. The way the walls never look clean. The big gawky black-on-white prices. Cigarettes. My father’s bony hands. I think about my father, drying out in Treatment. My father, drying up in jail. I wonder what I will ever do when I am twenty-one.