_12. Self Portrait

Six French girls at the table two down from mine on the back of a ferry from Piraeus are looking at the drawing of tyhe guy sitting next to them, charcoals mostly with the odd colored pencil sketch, and they’re into it and talking to him and one of them is particularly gorgeous, smoking cigarettes and flipping through his sketchbook looking like Athena in gold bracelets and big gold earrings hitting the right notes against the iris-blue Mediterranean and my buddy Ron looks over at me from his magazine and says “get a load of this guy behind me with the sketchbook” and I say I know, I noticed, un-fucking-believable they’re eating it up, and suddenly my envy becomes an inconsolable sadness, not because I am never, ever going to have sex with this beautiful French girl with slight rings beneath her eyes and a carnival of well-proportioned features comprising her equanimous face, but because I’m afraid to talk to strangers, and I never finished learning French and am too shy to practice and when I see beautiful girls on the far side of the room I am filled with an unabating, sharp-hearted sorrow only John Darnielle songs can ameliorate, and so now instead of doing something brave I’m drinking red wine with Ron and trying to forget I’m alive while the June sun, unsympathetic to the young and free, tries to bury itself once and for all beneath the Peloponnesus and leave all of us (me, Ron, six French women, the universe, whoever) in the dark and our own worst enemies.