Maximus Anthony Adarve ~ Déjà Vu

I trace the scars that tat­too the dark skin of your shoul­ders in the back seat of my Volvo s80 and tell you to stop pop­ping ben­zos so often. I like the way you sigh and roll your head back when I go down and how you wear that wig some­times. You’re pret­ti­er than my girl­friend when you wear that shit. Sometimes I feel like I should shave my legs more often. It’s get­ting warmer and I’ve been wear­ing shorts that bare­ly poke out the bot­tom of my jack­et. My legs look like hairy white tubes, and when we go inside your place and you take your coat off, they pale even more next to that flash of dark flat stom­ach skin show­ing through your mesh crop top. I wish I could sing, you can’t either but my girl­friend can and I think that alone is a rea­son to keep her around. Sometimes I can hear her singing when she’s not even there. Like last week­end when we went to those girls’ lit­tle brick town­house in Boystown and watched them do coke off their friend’s tits, the one with the shaved head, and we drank shit­ty beer, I could hear her har­mo­niz­ing in my mind’s ear. But you were prob­a­bly too high to remem­ber that. I real­ly do wish you’d slow down with the pills. One time, after all my friends left me at this house in Pilsen for a par­ty in Cicero, I washed a hand­ful of Xanax down with a six pack of 16oz Miller Highlife’s and thought I was going to die, pro­jec­tile vom­it­ing in the bath­room. But it’s fine now, and you’re real­ly pretty—really, real­ly pretty—lying here in my bed your upper lip curled up over your per­fect crooked pearly smile. It’s fine now. But when I wake up and real­ize you aren’t next to me, real­ize you’ve nev­er been over, nev­er been in my bed, nev­er went with me to Boystown, nev­er been in my piece of shit Volvo, well then that’s a dif­fer­ent story.

~

Maximus Anthony Adarve is a writ­ing major at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has spent time and/or lived in Spain, Peru, and California. Maximus has devel­oped his present artis­tic aes­thet­ic through a life marked by fre­quent move­ment and change in his liv­ing sit­u­a­tions and habi­tats. Much of the works he cre­ates ‑which include pieces in video, pho­to, per­for­mance, writ­ing, and draw­ing- focus on jux­ta­pos­ing the inner work­ings of dif­fer­ent social spheres, and ways of thought.