Seeking

Seeking

I.
She was the quiet one, the weeping willow who soft-stepped into a room, causing all heads to turn. I stood beside her soothed by her geisha-like stance. I loved her, ignoring her follies, and pretending that she understood my tales. I believed we both heard the same song, and that song would be our guide.
**
Now those chords of our youth seems so far away. I hear them; in mismatched notes and disjointed musical styles. Images come and go of memories that might be real or make believe. I don’t know if they are actually mine or just some imagined truth. When I close my eyes, all I can see is a black sky with vibrant specks of tiny stars that pulsate against my eye-lids like cracked riffs from a dissonant guitar
I reach out, looking for her within the constellation of the sound track of our youth. Nothing is really what it appears through the smoke and fog of memories. I see only hallucinations, fanciful anecdotes of my past that I call my soul. Still, I want to touch them, I want to feel them again. I want to hold the past in my hand and mold it into what I believe it should be for me. I want to scream out my own song, resurrect it, and begin again through attenuated tones of purposeful melodies kept well hidden under the folds of my bed covers.
She seeks me out through the buzz of the internet- the dull hum drums of the monotone electrical currents which connects us after two decades. With the careful tapping of her finger tips she finds me. I’m three thousand miles away with a new name, and a new song, and the riffs inside my head are no longer black specks, but colorful chords of events that I haven’t shared with her. My present is a whimsical purpose, and not the hammering out of cracked dreams, and misunderstood intentions. I no longer wear black, or dye my hair red. I let go of my youthful angst, put it in a bag, stored away with all the letters and notes, and false hopes that we once called our friendship.
Yet, she resurrects those bittersweet chords, the ones that house the sweet regrets, and washes them away with a song of her own. It is a shared song of words unsaid, and silent years of waiting for the right time to seek absolution. I try to turn down the static of unanswered questions that fill my head, in order to once again hear that song that we once shared, to listen without judgment, and forgive without remorse.
**
II.
I was the loud one, the boisterous wind that provoked her limbs to sway and move to the rhythm that I thought our friendship should take. I stood beside her regardless of what others said: whispering to her that we were invisible to the talk, we had our own song inside our heads.
**
I call her after that first exchange of emails. My heart pounding like an African drum, I dial her phone number, and hear her sing-song voice after two decades of silence. “I thought you hated me,” she asks after I rattle on about my current life, and how I live on a side of a mountain, and rescue unwanted dogs, and still ride horses. ‘Never,” I say choking back the tears; “you were my first best friend, the first to break my heart.”
I wait for her response; the musical thread in my head hums away, as I twist a strain of my now grey hair in my finger-tips. I no longer smoke, but right now, I long for the nicotine trance, to take me back. ‘You always were into rescuing,” she says. “You always had a dog and a cat.” She laughs changing the subject, telling me about her son, telling me about how now she is committed to being a mother. How she never thought she would be a mother since she abused her body so hard. I listen, as if I am looking through a camera lens, getting snap shots of her life.
**
II
We moved together, taking from one another’s strengths, using each other to quell the youthful turmoil in our heads. I pretended that all was right within the core of our friendship, regardless of hearing the whispers of falsehoods, and watching her actions of deceit.
**
I try to see and hear those memories clearly, but it is as if I suffer from tunnel vision. The more I think about them, the more they become distorted and twisted, taking a life of their own. But, again when I close my eyes, I see no color, only black and white snapshots of a past that does not really belong to my current events. She wanted to be a fashion designer; I wanted to be a poet. We spoke of our dreams in whispered hushes over the bleak tunes of songs of our youth, like Black Planet by Sisters of Mercy or Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus. We started hanging out at Pete’s, a dive coffee shop that all of Vince’s “cool” friends hung out at on Lincoln Ave., just off of Clark St. This was before Starbucks and quaint little coffee-shops that now can be found on every city street corner. We drank our cold coffee from standard porcelain white restaurant cups that came with saucers, which Vince and his friends liked to use as ashtrays. I became the tag- along to her romance with Vince and his friends. I walked ten feet behind her, and the black clad gang that had become her new friends.
These snap shots in my head fade in and out, as if I can hear my brain thinking, trying to make sense of the past, trying to rearrange the maze of memories to make some sort of sense out of them. The hum in my head is familiar, like the droning of my computer when it is on. I hear it. I am aware of it, but I have learned to ignore it.
Nostalgia lingers in a mutual verse of shared stories. How we use to sit out on the piers at North Beach and get stoned. How we use to hang out at Wax- Trax’s smoking our cloves cigarettes trying to impress all the Goth boys who wanted to be like Robert Smith from The Cure. I smell those cloves cigarette now as I listen to Bauhaus twenty years later. I feel that surge of angst that permeated the dance floor at Medusa’s as we made fun of all the North-shore posers that came into the city to be like us, or so we thought.
What does it mean after all these years of silence? What does it mean to seek out and find that speck of hope? What do we really have to share with each other after all these years of separate memories, and events that neither one of us was there to record for the other? This separateness is what now defines us, and I believe looking back that it was always there. There always was this feeling of distance. As if she was only a fragment of my imagination. As if she were a ghost of my past that I try to feel, but I can’t, because the more I try, the more my finger tips only slide through her apparition.
**
IV
The pain of remembering haunts me, causing a cacophony of unrelated sounds to vibrate across my brain making me blink, making me feel again.
**
We sit in her room listening to her stereo. Her hair dyed black, and her face is caked with white powder. I wear my black combat boots that give me blisters on the back of my heels. Yet, I still think as I flick my cigarette butt into an empty Coke can that I am making some sort of profound statement when I wear those boots that I had bought new, and try to make old by scuffing them along the pavement of the city streets we walk. She had recently pierced the side of her nose by sticking a carrot up one nostril, and using a safety pin to make the hole.
I witness the whole procedure the night before in her upstairs bathroom. I sit on the toilet lid as she takes quick sips from a chipped tea-cup filled with her father’s whiskey. I pass her the safety pin, watching from a distance. Her hand slightly trembles as she jabs the pin into her right nostril. A small trickle of blood drips down her upper lip, like a tear drop. I pass her a bit of toilet paper to wipe it away. She then sticks a small diamond earring in it. This, of course, was way before there were piercing shops on every city corner so it didn’t turn out like hers, a bit lop-sided.
**

V.
The song returns only to be cut short by the tainted memory of her trading in our friendship for the boy who wore the black leather jacket with obscure band stickers smeared across the back of it. She severed the chord to our friendship when she believed him, when he said that music didn’t have to always sound good to be music. But, then, I think maybe it happened before that, maybe it happened when she began to whiten her face; to really become invisible, to really disappear from me.
**
My memories of us are like a muted melody coming from an unplugged electrical guitar. I don’t know if they are true or just fragments of my anger making up my reality. Was it really over a boy that we broke-up? Is it so juvenile to believe that our friendship was broken up by a boy who now works as a security guard in a mall?
I try to recall the past. I remember that as our sophomore year came to an end, we no longer hung out after school. We no longer took the train down to Clark St together, like we used to. Instead, Vince started to pick her up in his beat-up Mustang, and I started making new friends. I’d watch from afar, as she powdered her nose waiting for him by the side of our school building. She always worried about her face, especially with the lop-sided nose piercing. I told her to take it out; it made her nose appear bigger. She confessed that Vince liked it, and that it was a statement to the lack of originality that existed in society. I asked her if it hurt, because it looked red and raw.
I began reading Jean- Paul Sartre that spring, and my mother was thinking about sending me off to the South of France for the summer. She asked me who I was mourning for when she saw my new look of black tights and big baggy sweaters, and of course, the combat boots that were too big and gave me blisters on the back of my heels. “Life,” I poetically responded. She laughed at me. I, too, thought it was funny, but I had an image to uphold, regardless of not having the right sort of a nose to pierce, regardless of whether the music inside my head was becoming stilted and jumbled. I believed, as I began to make new friends that the hurt that I hung onto would only make me more rhythmical, not nonexistent to her.
**
VI.
The voice of our youth returns when I hang up from our telephone call, and go about my day. Wondering what she is thinking, wondering if she has finally found peace with her demons. I know mine still haunt at night. I know that my present state of mind is slightly discordant with my past. But, for some reason, despite the years apart, I feel she understands.
**
I email on her 4oth birthday, but she does not respond. Again, I try for Thanksgiving, and I get a quick response, but nothing of significance. I want to get to know her better, again. But I sense her reluctance. So, I stop emailing, and begin to remember.
That summer before our junior year, my mother did send me away to the South of France. I had styled my hair in a perfect French bob. While there, I visited Paris, and took the Metro by myself to find Jim Morrison’s grave. I stood by his vandalized headstone, chain smoking my newly acquired French cigarettes that tasted like cardboard and made me gag. But still I smoked them because I thought they made me appear sophisticated. I remember staring at his tomb, and thinking it was so funny that someone had chiseled off his nose, and stolen it. I thought of her, and wondered how she was spending her summer, as I roamed the City of Lights by myself, in hopes of quieting my head.
I scribbled on his tomb, like everyone else, some inane verse of how I was there and how one day I would return. Like he cared, I thought, as I made my way back to the Metro, discarding my half-smoked cigarette at the foot of the entrance to the station.
We ran into each other on the first day of our junior year. She had lost weight, and the innocence of her rounded figure had been replaced by a ghastly white stick with drab dyed black hair that stuck out in every direction. Her eyes were vacant as she asked me how my trip had gone, I mumbled something about spitting on Jim Morrison’s grave which made her laugh. She asked me if I wanted to hang out sometime, I said sure knowing it was never going to be like old times, knowing that I was only fooling myself to think we could reach back to the fall before, and find something of importance. She was still dating Vince, and her crooked diamond nose ring had been replaced by a silver hoop. She bragged that she was now listening to Siouxsie and the Banshee’s, and I looked at her wilted figure, and wept silently for what had been lost between us. Later, I wept loud sobbing tears at my mother’s feet, asking her why my heart felt like it was breaking in two.
**

VII.
I don’t tell her when we talk on the phone again, that I know why she had really contacted me. I sensed from the beginning that she was trying to make amends with her past: seeking some sort of absolution from me when I got her first email. I know it is part of the twelve step program in AA to call everyone you felt you had hurt from your past. I listen, trying not to judge, trying to put my own anger to rest.
**
It comes back to me now, how a couple weeks into our junior year she started coming over to my apartment during the school week at three in the morning. I’d hear her knock on the back door. My bedroom was right off the kitchen, a step away from the back door. I’d let her in.
“I’m drunk,” she’d say,” I can’t go home”.
“How did you get here?” I’d ask.
“Taxi,” she’d mumble as she walked into my room, and flung herself onto my bed, rolling over to face the wall, and passing out.
My mother would find us in my twin size bed each morning; I cuddled up to her small frame breathing in our song, and hoping that the old her would return, the one that wore bright colors, and didn’t have her nose pierced. The her that didn’t reek of whiskey and stale cigarette smoke, but still smelled of Kim Chee and fried boloney. My mother never complained, only asking me if we were gay. I angrily told her no, she didn’t understand that it was not a physical love I felt for her. It had nothing to do with the physical, I yelled to her.
I knew that she drank to try and become more and more invisible to the world that haunted her. I knew, but I never said anything. I quietly bowed out, letting go of the illusion of what I thought our friendship should be. I never asked about the bruises I saw on her arms and legs as she dressed for school.
**
VIII.
What, after two decades of silence, do we have to give each other now?
**
She sends me pictures of herself and her son. I stare long and hard at them. She does not look as I remember. Again, memories are so deceiving. But the structure of her face has completely changed. I rummage through old photos of us in the boxes that I have stored away with the notes we use to pass each other in the hall-ways between classes. Her handwriting is big and loopy, as I reread the simple notes of “need a smoke” I hate Spanish class” or “can’t wait ---Clark St”. These notes are codes of our past, hints of our mutual affection toward each other. I breathe in a faint trace of orange blossoms. She liked to eat an orange at lunch, and that is when she wrote these notes. I breathe in our friendship from these notes, and remember how she liked to kiss each note to seal it with her red lip stick. I have a box full of those red-lip stick stained notes faintly smelling of orange blossoms. I want to send them all to her, but I don’t. They are mine to keep-- evidence of a part of me that no longer exists.
Instead, I send her a photo where she is smiling out to the camera; the one where her face is round, and not so slight, as it is now. It was taken in front of our school entrance, a week after we met. I had written on the back “Giddy Day”. Was I giddy that day? I don’t remember. I don’t really remember that day at all.
I send her recent pictures of me, and she responds that I have not changed one bit. I still look the same. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing. I examine my face long and hard in my bathroom mirror. My face is fatter, and I have puffy bags under my eyes. But, I still see within my own eyes the faintest glimmer of my youth. I still see that smile from my past creeping up along the slight wrinkles around my eyes. I don’t tell her that I see the real her, the one that I remember, in her son’s big brown eyes.
I close my eyes so tight. I feel the warmth of a spring afternoon as I walk though Warren Park. My tongue slides over my bare teeth. I just got my braces off. I click off my walkman, as I light my cigarette, laughing at her bouncing down the sidewalk, an Asian Cindi Lauper. We talk and hug, as we find an empty park bench to sit on as we flick our cigarette butts on the sidewalk in front of us. I smile, showing off my now bare teeth. I hear that musical hum inside my head, trying so hard to relive that sound before she met Vince, before the bruises, before the silence. How we used to go back to her house after school and eat Korean food and watch the latest MTV videos, when MTV still played music videos.
She calls me just the other day, to wish me a Happy New Year. It comes as a surprise as I retrieve my messages off my cell phone. At first, I don’t recognize her voice, and then as the voice rattles on, in her familiar sing–song manner, it hits me. She sounded happy, almost giddy. I replay the message again taking in the voice that I had shared so many late night conversations with as I pulled the kitchen phone into my bedroom, so we could discuss in secrecy what we should wear for our next out of uniform day at school. How we needed to get tickets for the Depeche Mode concert, and how we should try and obtain some fake ID’s. I smile as I think about how it seemed so important to us to be cool and different from all the rest of the girls at our high school. How we so wanted to stand out, and make some sort of profound statement that we could be remembered by. It’s a worn- out common song that every generation wishes for. I grab from the past, hoping to get it right, hoping to recall events correctly. But, some days, I feel as if I am walking though a fog; as if I am blind. I feel at times that the past me has nothing to do with my present state of mind. Does it really matter what happened? Does it really matter that we went our separate ways?
**
VIIII.
The last time I saw her, she was running down an alley way behind Clark St., in some drunken fit with Vince, and I was crying out her name. She shouted back to me that our friendship was over. I was left to sob on the stairs in front of an apartment building on Pine St., as my friend Margaret shouted expletives down the alleyway at her, only to be heard by neighbors, who then called the police. We all fled in different directions.
My memory seems so romantic, bursting with dramatic chords like the sweet painful songs of Joy Division that we use to listen to in her darken bedroom, smoking our cigarettes to rid ourselves of our youthful angst. I reach for, hoping they are correct, but I know the truth, and they are only cruel reminders of our disillusioned youth. Yet, still I seek something from her. I reach far inside my heart to remember that feeling of togetherness she gave me whenever I stood next to her. When I close my eyes tight, I can still hear that hum; the hum of our song before she became a fragment of my imagination, a ghostly speck compared to the constellation inside my head. And then she calls again, and asks when I am coming to town. She wants me to meet her son, and I muse as I replay her message wondering if the spaces that were left behind can now be aligned to represent what now plays in my head.
***