The Sun, It Settles

*
My sanity failed me completely that night and I felt, at least on this particular occasion, that the world was sending me a message that it just doesn't care for people like me, that in these instances karma actually does exist despite my efforts to ignore it while doing drugs in my mother's home by myself on my broken bed, and that this night was the night to define my mental capacity for the rest of my life. I was sick and irreversibly miserable and hadn't slept for three days. Ava was waiting for me in the rain, probably with her legs out, exposed to the wind and the dregs of the winter past at the bus stop so we could jet up to the city to buy her mother a cheap crap gift before we headed towards San Jose, a humorous "Hollywood" souvenir and perhaps a quickly snapped picture of Robin Williams' star, as her mother was a big fan of his in the 70's, something I liked about her mother because that's when he was most fucked up. Well maybe. But I copped without her with money that my grandmother gave "us" for food along the way, because Berto said he'd be passing around my neighborhood and I said "might as well make a round to my place if you are near." And he did and now I am terribly late with no ounce of guilt. And I thought to myself... why should I be guilty ever? I am alone in this world without a woman's fuck, which is a transient thing, which could possibly be one of the cheapest institutions in our nation today, that is, the "love" of a woman, and if Ava and I had not grown up with each other, and she had not had some attachment to her father directly through these experiences we had growing up and through me presently, she probably would have left me by now for some big dick business man or even worse a pimp... And in these thoughts on my baby blue covered bed with the broken leg, I suddenly feel like a complete fucking ass hole.
The phone rang, I jumped, and all ready I could hear Ava's sweet wet voice like the angel she is soothing the line despite the storm outside... I pick up and say nothing. 
"Christian? Chris!.." 
Still I say nothing and she hears me shuffle.. I can hear the rain behind her back growing as large as a phantom by the second. 
"God dammit Chris I am fucking soaked..." 
Thunder
"  there are a lot of creeps out.. " 
Wind. The arms of the phantom reach right through the phone line and begin to choke me.. 
"I think Berto was trying to get a hold of my phone" 
My heart drops. She's on to me.
"..but my screen broke this morning so I couldn't catch the call but I copped off some house keeping woman by the inn right here" 
"Does this mean you are on to me?" I whisper accidentally without realizing it and she says "What's that? What?"
 I say "Honey baby what do you mean you broke the screen" 
"What? I mean it broke so I can't see calls.. That's what I mean by it" 
"Ava, honey, why are you a mess with your phones all the time? Why do you have to be so clumsy baby?" And she says I'm just as bad and to meet her in less than half an hour or else she'll hop in some Jon's sports car convertible and make her way out to Los Angeles by her own means, and I no longer feel like an ass hole, and surprised, when I drop the line in the egg basket, I wonder how I ever did feeling as fucked up and marvelous as I do now.
That was a year ago, when Ava was still on my team.  My then whimsical four person team,mechanically in place no matter which town I was in. Ava, me, the man, the drug. Now a days I am lucky if I can even get Angelo to not yell at me.

Ava has seven names.
She told me so when I was 16 and hungry and she was 14 and about to ruin her life, haphazardly, over vanilla shakes at Millie's. I thought she must be shitting me.
"You've got to be fucking shitting me!"
"Do you always have to be so vulgar?" She had no idea.
"Just say it again."
Marylin Ava Maria Atlantis Lee Ann Reyes.
The aroma of every moment I would have sliding around the smoke of her teenage illusions and pink, scraped up knee caps swept over me. I felt above each word painting every letter with my tongue, feet above me chained to hell in reverse with the heavens buried deep below us and the the biblical wrath past our ceilings and the clouds.
"Say it slowly though.."
Her lips made me ache and I watched her words slither out of her throat in chords and music through teeth I had just realized were massive in her skull.
"Marylin...Ava... Maria.. Atlantis...Lee... Ann... Reyes."

Marylin Ava Maria Atlantis Lee Ann Reyes.