Everything Feels Like the Weather

Lewis opened the door to let me in and asked me to excuse the mess. I had already forgotten about it because I’ve known her for years. Her hands were covered in black charcoal and her hair in tangles with black streaks in it. I know her blue eyes, as if she was from somewhere else in past life and still longed to return there. There are piles of clothes everywhere, stacks of rusty books, filled ashtrays, broken glass scattered over the kitchen floor. I ask her what happened and she tells me that she just got angry at this Tele-marketer and decided to throw some plates to scare him into hanging up the phone. “On cold days like these,” she used to say, “Everything feels like the weather.”

“What’s the date anyway?” she asks me, using one of her palms to push a strand of dark blonde hair away from her face as she plops down into the only couch in the apartment.

“October second?” I answer quickly, clearing one of the kitchen chairs for me to sit on.

“I can’t believe it, it’s been another month already. I don’t have any money to pay the bastard downstairs for this dump.” I know she is up to something because she’s breathing a little deeper and is she’s unusually restless. She tells me she’s been off drugs, but I know there is something else to it.

Somehow I see myself, five years from now, still doing this. Walking the five blocks from my house to hers to see how she’s doing. Picking her up for her five random things at the grocery store like boxes of cereal or vanilla ice cream. I don’t know why I do this. Perhaps because she knows me better than I do or maybe because things don’t always end after they begin. Maybe because I know exactly what would happen if I stopped coming: She’d waste all of her money on boys and collapse on the sidewalks of Chicago, broke, drunk, open to the world. She wasn’t always like this.

She was painting a mural on her wall of some place in England she’d only read about where she’d never go. If anything, she could paint. That’s how we met in the first place, two emotional artists who quoted James Joyce and wanted to change the world. We were in the same art class and she smelled of cigarette smoke that was neither offensive nor pleasant.

“Hi, I’m Lewis,” I can still recall her saying, tossing a stick of Big Red in her mouth. She wore plain shirts and jeans, pretending like she could own the world if she wanted to. It wasn’t a completely ridiculous belief, I could have believed her during the first year I knew her.

Her apartment was fairly small. Dark leather curtains hung from the window to window and everything was dusty. There were breakfast plates and probably plates from last night’s dinner on the coffee table in front of TV. They held dried toast crust and leftover grape jelly. There was one small dark couch and no other place to sit down except in the kitchen. Lewis never had enough money to afford real furniture and what little money she had didn’t last.

“I can’t stay long,” I told her. “I have a lot of homework. With college applications and work afterwards.”

She removed her paintbrush and frowned. “I thought we had decided this. I thought we were going to team up and form a painting company or something after you graduated.”

“It was just an idea, Lewis. You’re not even close to graduating. Besides, how would it work? You’ve never held a steady job in your life.”

“Fine, you know what, you just go. Get out of here. You think I can’t do things by myself? Think I can’t hold down a job? You’re wrong; you just get out of here. I don’t want to see you. I don’t need your trivial pity visits. You might as well just go if you’re so busy.”

I used to imagine that she would become this infamous artist and have displays up in museums in Europe like she wrote about in her leather-bound journals. I used to think we might find ourselves in our twenties, sitting on a bench somewhere in Germany, feeding pigeons and discussing the latest underground musicians. Instead, she was off her rocker, kicking me out before I had a chance to breathe. On cold days like these everything feels like the weather.

She lives in a world where graffiti is sprayed on every building and where underprivileged children lean over the railings of their tiny balconies, accidentally throwing down clean clothing that was hanging out to dry. They play soccer in the alley and kick over garbage cans filled with fast food containers and milkshakes.

“You were at Lewis’s again, weren’t you?” Her stare impressions itself in me and I’m forced to look away. I don’t answer my mother, choosing instead to dodge for the refrigerator and grab the apple juice. “I don’t want you over there. You’re not going over there anymore.”

“Since when is it a crime to visit your friends?” She’s talking to me like I’m six years old again, wearing overalls covered in grass and throwing balls in my backyard. I had never heard of Lewis Scotch then. I only knew how many crayons I had, how many drawings of houses I had hidden in my dresser drawer. It seemed like that was all that would ever matter.

I drank down a glass of juice. Lewis always thrived on being the wild child. It empowered her, cradled her. I don’t blame her for the way she was because I don’t know her. I’m not sure if anyone does or ever has. I went to a local diner for dinner one night with her, she said she had a couple guys waiting for her there. We sat at one of the booths in the farthest corner of the room and one of the guys she met there passed her a white substance packed away tightly in a transparent bag. She knew what she was getting into. She wasn’t stupid. She was so street smart that no one could ever bring her down, keeping her secrets close to her like guns. Her way of protecting herself was never letting anyone unto her battleground.

You have to come here,” I remember her saying. She called my house while my mother was gone out of town. It was nearly two AM. I pulled a pair of faded jeans on and walked the five blocks to her apartment, wondering if she’d ever see the sun again. You never knew with her. She wasn’t made of steel as much as she pretended to be. She told me to sit down and handed me her guitar. Her eyes were red and her face was flushed, but I stayed despite the idea to leave formulating itself between my heart and my brain.

“Play something,” she urged, so I strummed Jon Bon Jovi on her acoustic and she smiled lightly, soaking up the sound of solace. I just sat there and played until the sunlight wedged through the blinds and she had fallen asleep in spite of herself. I still don’t know what happened, seems I never do, but I’m not sure if the past is such a great friend to know anyway. If you treat time unequivocally, it only smacks you harder.

My mother’s shadow on the wall moved back and forth. She was gathering pans and boiling water on the stove, incoherently saying something about somebody she works with.

“You should look over your notes, you know. Better to be too prepared,” my mother advised, turning to look at me.

“It’s only five-thirty,” I retorted defensively.

“Just a suggestion,” she murmured. “Just wondering if that Lewis Scotch girl is getting to you and your studies. You were always a happy child. You used to get such excellent grades and paint such nice things. Why don’t you paint anything nice anymore?”

I rubbed my eyes and shrugged. “Things change.”

She pointed at a stack of my paintings that rested over the counter.

“Really, what is all of this? It’s dark and morbid. People don’t want to see this.”

“You mean, you don’t want to see this. Most people have no problem with what I do. It’s just another style,” I explained.

“Well, stop painting like that.” She took the bundle of paintings and ripped them up without blinking. Quickly, rapidly and tossed the remnants in the garbage and went back to her cooking as if nothing happened. This was her way of winning the war. She wanted me to be what she guessed I’d be, molded it to fit around something stronger, something tangible.

I didn’t even look at her. I took my jacket from the sofa and slipped on my running shoes, walked out of the house with five dollars in my pocket. I fell into the pouring rain, ran down the cement stairs and headed to nowhere in particular, with her shouting in the background.

I don’t know why I walked to Lewis’s. I’d just been there, and she kicked me out. I guess I went back because I belonged there with her and she knew it. She saw through the superficiality people used to classify. She knew you didn’t have to be stupid to fail and that poverty wasn’t selective. She knew I’d come back, the way I always did, because in so many ways I would have done anything to have an ounce of the nerve she had, to choose to live her life.

I climbed the stairs up to her apartment because the elevator wasn’t working. I knocked on the door, but nobody answered. I knocked again and realized that no one would. I tried the handle and opened the door and walked inside smelling the grilled cheese and the paint cans that were still out.

“Lewis?” I shouted. The clock chimed. “Lewis?” I repeated.

I rushed to her room. Maybe she was just taking a rest.

The door creaked open and I found her on the floor her head was leaning against her right arm. I shouted at her, but she didn’t move. Lewis, Lewis. She didn’t move. Sweat was running down my face now, but it couldn’t be tears. I wasn’t crying. I turned Lewis over and she seemed so lifeless but still breathing, like she was just in one of those trances of hers where she didn’t want to wake up for anything. In high school, everyone wanted to be beautiful like her, possess all of that confidence that seemed to come to her so naturally. Cocaine was a kind of seven-letter evil, something without a single warning the damage that could be done. And now she was being overtaken and slowly succumbing to the cold of the weather.