Vignette 5
A Dirty Goddess on 99th and Whyte
I see her for the first time in years on Whyte Ave. The last time I saw her was in a small room in Montreal that smelled like cigarette smoke, Indian food and pain. She’d been sleeping, naked and wrapped up in my sheets the day I left and never came back.
She’s a wreck now. Her eyes are dark, her face too thin and stained with dirt from nights on the street. She’s leaned up on the slats that make up the Empress Saloon’s outside walls. She looks every bit the homeless girl to anyone who’s never lived on the streets.
Her name is Trinity. I loved her, once.
If I think about it, I can still taste the stale ash of her kisses, feel the litheness of her body against mine. We never slept together. I tell myself sometimes it’s because I didn’t want to, she’d been around the block a little too often for me, but I know it’s a lie.
She’s got on a little white dress, slept in and wrinkled. A cup lies at her feet, and she stares into it dejectedly. There’s no sign of a backpack, no cart, no belongings. There’s just the girl and her cup, standing beside the wooden slats that make up the Empress Saloon’s outer walls. There isn’t a lot of foot traffic here, but there’s a bus stop, and the people who pass her sometimes drop some change into the cup.
I watch her from across the street, and think about things that never happened, but might have.
The image straight jacked from Jacony. He stole it from other people. You should go see.
I saw a post by someone (I believe it was CounterFeitRedHead, but I can’t remember for sure) about people who reblog without due credit. While I may not reblog like other people reblog, I do like to make an attempt to give credit to the people who are the source of my pictures. I just hate the idea of formatting my vignettes like a comment. Comments are ugly, nasty little things that are tagged onto the bottom of a piece. I’m trying to take a picture and make something new out of it.
