I can breathe easy after a drive with Quinn. After a night when he and I climb in his car, and we go roaring out into the night. Like, we get on the freeway and really let people know where the free comes from. It’s like this:

All windows down, hair flying out the window, hand out there too, making waves in the wind. Like we’re going 75, but the gas is still to the floor and Quinn is weaving around people like we’ve forgotten our mortality. But even with our fearlessness, I still reach out and hold his hand—yet so carefully, like there’s webbing on our hands, and so I only weave our fingers together to the first knuckle.

So I’ll look over at him to make sure it’s okay, but he doesn’t even notice. His eyes are on the road, watching for the screams that are coming out of his mouth, and he’s racing his own voice, and they’re both beating his silly, flame-orange dreads that are trailing behind, that are out the window.

Then I think he’s not looking, and I go to the second knuckle—and he looks over and smiles, and I should have known he was knowing all along. But he just squeezes my hand so it’s okay.

-

31 July 2008, 21:02

Quinn has become, in a way, my muse. I started writing about him late one summer night while in Asheville, North Carolina, and he's something I return to every now and then when I just need something to write. There's not so much a plot line as there is a recounting of events, a biography of sorts.

Quinn is a figment of my imagination. The narrator is loosely based on me, in that I'm kind of an insomniac, I guess, though nothing she describes really relates to my life.

Many of the installments to the Quinn story are about this length. I'm going to continue uploading them in these short bits; it makes it less continuous, I guess, but easier to read, and I won't add footnotes to any more of them, which I think will help.