(no subject)
Yesterday while Cadence and I were watching the exciting end of The Sound of Music, my cell phone rang. Then our home phone. I listened to the message,and it was B, crying and telling me that our mutual friend, Melissa, had died on Friday of a brain aneurysm. She found out because she had gone to Melissa's facebook page to leave her a message and couldn't help noticing all the condolences.
Melissa and I were pretty close during our last two years of high school. We went on weekend trips together in my parent's truck- a few times to Port Townsend, at least once to Yakima and Selah. We would smoke and laugh and look for cute guys and visit other Unitarian Universalist conference goers. I thought she was beautiful and perfect and different than everyone else. I wondered later if I might have had a buried crush on her, but nothing sexually intimate ever happened between us. At some point, I took her along to a Unitarian youth conference. They happened every six months and lasted for a weekend. These conferences were an important part of my life at that time, and it turned out to be no different for Melissa. She immediately bonded with many of us and we all stayed up all night drinking coffee, smoking clove cigarettes, and listening to the Violent Femmes. These conferences gave me one of the first opportunities to be intimate but not necessarily sexual. We had big group massage sessions and we cuddled with each other and talked for hours sometimes. I'm so grateful for these experiences. My memories of Melissa will always be tied up in those good feelings, driving around in my folk's yellow Chevy luv, smoking cigarettes with the windows all the way down in the snow, laughing and driving and driving. Saying sappy goodbyes at the end of conference while packing up the cars. Goodbye Melissa.
Melissa and I were pretty close during our last two years of high school. We went on weekend trips together in my parent's truck- a few times to Port Townsend, at least once to Yakima and Selah. We would smoke and laugh and look for cute guys and visit other Unitarian Universalist conference goers. I thought she was beautiful and perfect and different than everyone else. I wondered later if I might have had a buried crush on her, but nothing sexually intimate ever happened between us. At some point, I took her along to a Unitarian youth conference. They happened every six months and lasted for a weekend. These conferences were an important part of my life at that time, and it turned out to be no different for Melissa. She immediately bonded with many of us and we all stayed up all night drinking coffee, smoking clove cigarettes, and listening to the Violent Femmes. These conferences gave me one of the first opportunities to be intimate but not necessarily sexual. We had big group massage sessions and we cuddled with each other and talked for hours sometimes. I'm so grateful for these experiences. My memories of Melissa will always be tied up in those good feelings, driving around in my folk's yellow Chevy luv, smoking cigarettes with the windows all the way down in the snow, laughing and driving and driving. Saying sappy goodbyes at the end of conference while packing up the cars. Goodbye Melissa.