This was written a long time ago.  I'm putting it here and forgetting about it.  It's not what I call good but it reminds me of who I was once.  I like a few phrases here and there even as I wince at the immaturity.

She took a long, serious drag off of the cigarette.  Her type was regular.  None of that menthol or low tar for her. she liked to taster the cancer in each drag.  She squinted her eyes and for an instant revealed a feline quality. Then, she exhaled through thin pink lips as if punishing him.

As smoke curled around him, he reflected once again on the fact that public service announcements claiming that smoking wasn't cool lied.  Lied like bastards who work in liar plants. 

She was the reason he sat in a dingy diner on the far side of three in the morning sipping chewy, grainy coffee.   He had known her for a litttle over a year and in that time she had encircled him in a gauzy fog that showed no signs of  lifting.  He was utterly fascinated by the way she twirled through life without a hint of shame or hesitation, the way she devoured knowlege and assimilated it into her own askew world, and , perhaps even more revelatory, the way she belched without any pretense of doing something else.  He could never be as casual with the embarrassments that his body presented, but she was totally at ease with herself and her world.

His relationship with her wasn't the type that led to a passionate affaie, a sonnet cycle, or a suicide pact; it was a strange junior high flirtation.  He had self-consciously kissed her one spring night by the Ouachita River.  He had sked and received nohing more.  His love for her was not a secret.  She had received more than one drunken early morning phone calls that began with chivalric oaths, descended into sub-Byronic verse, and capped with something from the canon of the Beastie Boys or Andrew Dice Clay .

This history of undergraduate self-made melancholy compunded to bring him to this particular place on this particular night.  She had called with something urgent to tell him.   Emergencies like this came , typically, after he had told her of his vital zoology mid-term the next morning.  He wouldn't have put her off no matter what, but something in her voice made him beleive that the announcemnt, the pronouncement, the edict, might have something to do with him.

 The waitress with the blank name tag  freshened his coffee. H esmiled the little boy smile he always gave waitresses.  She returned it, and he sipped his freshly brewed hemlock.

After the waitress had hurried to the next table that wouldn't leave her a tip,  he gaped as his reason for being here took another drag and ran her fingers through her hair.  Then, she focused on him.  Holding her gaze, he felt butterflies twirl in his gut, and he braced himself for a relationship definition. 

"I'm glad you came." she started.  GET ON WITH IT! GET ON WITH IT!  His mind screamed and he smiled. 

"What I've got to say is I'm leaving school and heading North,"

"Heading North?" He desperately tried ot maintain his usual affectation of world weariness and not he hopelessness of his monotone slip through.

"Yeah, I've been thinkin' about all the stuff I've talked about.  Well, that's just it.  All I've done is talk."

His lip quivered; she didn't notice.

"Wh-What made you decide this all of a sudden?" He Asked.  "Isn't it kinda sudden? Kinda rash?"  Damn right, it's rash.  How could he have babies with her and build dreams if she was in some shadowland near Gondor called Up North?

'Well ,it's been a long time coming.  I've been thinking about people who have seen what they wanted in life and went out and made it happen." She revved up."You know, people like Mary Shelley, Sandra Day O' Connor, Ron Popeil, and Nancy Spungen."

He took a huge painful gulp of coffee.

"What about school?"  What about him, for the love of Pete?

"I can always come back, but now is now."

He shook his head gravely.

"I gotta go wile I'm young, Danny-Boy."

You're going while I'm young, too. He thought.

"You aren't thinking this through. I mean-"

"I'm not the one who thinks things through, Gibraltar."

Tell her. Some Bastard in his head screamed. If you don't, you are lost forever.

'So you've made up your mind?" he asked.

He watched the cleft in her chin rise and fall.  He knew his last chance had come. 

"You packed?" he asked.

"Everything's in my truck."

"You have my address?"

'Yup."

He gulped the grounds atthe bottom of his cup, stood up, and absently flicked a couple of dollars on the table.

"Goodbye Hug?" She reached for him.  He hugged her and left her in the diner.   He never looked back.

In his car, headed back to the healthy squalor of his dorm room, tears began to trickle quietly down his cheeks.  His large frame convulsed, and he swerved to the side of the road and rested his head on the steering wheel.  He letthe tears stream down his face and form a waterfall that cascaded down the steering wheel and form random splotches on the crotch of his jeans. 

Slowly, he raised his head and through the Kamikaze bug corpses he could read the local bowling alley's marquee that proudly proclaimed:

WE NOW HAVE VIDEO REDEMPTION!

He began to laugh.   At first, it was a choked,dry laugh, but it grew until it was true and rich.  The car filled with laugh like specimen jar overflowing with urine. 

Finally, it was done, and he felt better.  He coughed twice, and drove off laughing.

"Yes, sir, we now have video redemption."  he said.