The early twilight of the iguana

One night I was almost seventeen. I sat down in a brown velvet armchair to read Pablo Neruda because I’d just discovered I was too chicken to drink my first can of Guinness. The house was very quiet and very empty. The black beer had been sitting in the corner of my oma’s pantry, surprisingly. I casually moved it to the refrigerator door on the first morning while I was unpacking my groceries. I’d been eying it for three days. The whole idea was risky. Who knew what would happen if I popped it open and downed the whole thing, like I wanted to? Guinness was muddy and delicious and Sophisticated-Proletarian, but in the last six months alone I had become friends with a university dropout who busked as a card magician for a living and was in a band, started dating a boy, acquired a pocket knife that flipped open like a switch blade, stopped taking violin lessons, stopped going to church every Sunday, and started studying harder than I ever had in my life. Within a month my first published poem was going to be coming out in an alternative feminist literary journal. Some other night it would seem perfectly normal and innocent, but there are nights when deciding to drink your first alcohol alone is a destructive idea. There are nights when you are almost seventeen and using up experiences much too frivolously.