Rebound Girl

She asks me if we can go to Times Square and see the ball drop. I tell her in another life, when we're tourists.

She then sets the mood, the fun it'd be, the crowds, the spectacle and excitement. All I can envision is the insufferable train ride back, drunken teenagers, nowhere to pee. 

"All to see a ball drop" I say. "I'd much rather stay home and watch your ass... drop. Baby, you're my rebound girl... gotta make that ass bounce!" Of course, we're more than sexually acquainted. Our affinities lie in that opposites attract. See, people miss so much by being themselves and only wanting to date mind-like individuals, I guess that's the tragedy of having our heads so far up our narcissistic asses.

We're different. She just turned 22; I'll be forty 41 in two months. Of course, I look nothing like a forty-year old, in fact I don't feel a day older than 27. We're similar, too. She's from the Caribbean; I am too. The places each one of us respectively come from were always sunny, full of folklore and upbeat rhythm, drums, endless sunsets, seafood, beach days, happy people everywhere. 

"Baby, are people happy in Haiti?" 

"Just like with everything else, honey. Misery doesn't have a nationality."

Clever girl. 

Sexually, I'd use as an analogy those deep rollers that the actor Anthony Hopkins, playing his famous movie character Hannibal, warns about not breeding two of the same kind (deep rollers) because their young will dive too deep and die: we're sexually deep rollers, if ever we have siblings, these will fuck till death.

"Only if they're incestuous" she argues.

"Or if they find another fuck roller" I counter.

She's the religious kind, a baptist of all kinds, goes to church on Sundays, preaches the word every chance she gets. She says, I should repent.

"You should go to church, baby" she tells me.

"It's not gonna fly, sweetie" I warn her.

I try to get her to meditate but she says meditation is a pagan ritual. She's not a Buddhist, she says. Therefore, she won't.

"You know, that's what I like about Buddhism. The Buddha does not claim a divine providence. He's not a supernatural being. Buddhists are free to celebrate with others their holiday and it'd not piss off Buddha. In Christianity, you have to believe in Jesus as the son of God and humankind's sole savior. Buddhism leaves it up to its followers finding their own path in life. "If you find the Buddha, kill him" says a Buddhist quote, no space for resurrection, no damnation, no salvation, no one to look after you. You're your own boss in your personal quest, you're not subjugated to the celestial whims of an uptight, capricious deity bent on retribution. 

"That's right, baby. God is gangsta!" 

"Babe, leave God alone" she says. 

"Him first" I say. 

New Year's Eve found me doing the laundry after working a full shift, apparently I have to pay for other people's superstitions. Granted, we've been laying on those sheets for the last two weeks, and not just sleeping, sweat, tears, bodily fluids, dust, food residues, alcohol and fruity drink mixed stains, all form a collage of whatnot. 

"If we don't have clean clothes on the first day of the year, we will be with dirty clothes throughout the whole year!" she claims.

"The way I see it, if I spend the last day of the year washing clothes, that's what I'll be doing the rest of the upcoming year." 

She gets the joke but reserves the laugh.