another versiou

I kissed a god and stole from God that summer. The god was named Cole. He was grimy in the way that soap scum sticks to a shower drain. Muck had settled on him, had laid claim in his hair, between, in, and around his fingers and toenails. In his filth, he manifested a realness that included a reckless and obvious malaise. He was discountenance in its perfect manufacture. Not keen to politeness, Cole never smiled back and never engaged in directionless conversation, which was only meant for the innocent purpose of filling up the burdened air with happy-talk. The air only wanted to be water that summer. It was a balmy- wet that kept your skin alive, sucking up all the wet. He'd turned ripe too early in his life and, worst of all, he knew this. The small college town clutched his throat, threatening to pin him down and keep him there just like everybody else. It was my first summer in Oxford, Mississippi. I hailed from a small, Step-ford-Ville, where I matched perfectly. I was the Step-ford daughter, equipped with the good grades, good behavior, good skin… all a mother dearest could request. However, the instant the University of Mississippi (known best as Ole Miss, one of the top party schools in a nation of heavy drinkers) accepted me as a freshmen, my whole little world began to spin in the opposite direction. No longer did my life gravitate around a sun or a Son. It now orbited around myself.
Something to be learned from Oxford, Mississippi: this is a place that’s antique in its traditions, confused and limited by the idea of a New South. It’s halted in development, yet trapped and loved for in its multifarious and many-times mocked traditions. These young, entitled women don their best and most beautiful and expensive gowns to the Grove yet tarnish the idea of the Southern gentlewoman, by accidentally (as always), getting obscenely obliterated through that uber-combination of Maker’s Mart and diet coke, made classy and inconspicuous in a plastic red Solo cup. It’s backwards and beautiful. The only way the South will ever truly rise again is through the sweetly drunken eyes of a Ole Miss lad or lass. And that's okay, here.