A memory that rolls around in my head.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and internally I was bracing myself, grimacing really, in anticipation of the tense annual display of familial tradition at that old restaurant on the water, back in the small town in which we grew up.
You walked up to our table as our server, hair peroxided, silver rings on eight of your fingers. I don't think I would have been more jolted had the bay that was crashing outside the window suddenly swallowed the whole place up. We greeted and hugged and acknowledged that we had not seen each other since high school graduation, three and a half years before. "You look good...it's been so long..." My voice caught in my throat, I couldn't ask you where you'd been, what you'd been doing with yourself. There was something so weary and broken about your appearance, despite the obvious upkeep that went into maintaining this waitress-chic look you had going for you.
I remember when you colored two strands of your naturally blond hair with a crayola marker in 6th grade. When you dated a boy who had been so much older than all of us when we were still crossing our fingers for breasts and periods. When you cried because he wasn't what he pretended to be. When you were rumored to be dating an older girl in the high school. You were different than the rest of us. Years ahead of us. I probably envied you at times, the flow you had, the way such exciting things rolled in and out of your life, the casual way you carried yourself, your creativity. You were beautiful, you were good to those around you, and you were real. I admired you. And as we both faded into the background of our small class, trying out different groups of friends and abandoning any obligation to the only and homogeneous group we had known since Kindergarten, we probably more or less forgot that each other existed.
It wasn't that we were ever exactly close, or that at the time I had been intent on the details of your life, but years later I remembered something about the root of your unhappiness in Southold, and how ready, ready, ready you were to leave. I was ready to leave, too. I understood that urgency. I wished great things for you. I never heard what became of you after they handed you that diploma. I heard you had gone to North Carolina.
So years later, I launched a mini-massive campaign, if such a thing could have ever been. I Facebooked every person with your (rather common) name whom seemed like they could maybe be you. Myspaced. Googled. And asked around like mad. None of these efforts turned up a lick of information.
I wanted to say this was you brought our water and took our orders. I wanted to explain that for a period in time I became consumed with the idea of knowing what you were doing, wondering if you ever made it out, hoping that you were far, far from where we started. I wasn't obsessed with this idea, I just wanted to know what happened in the next chapter. I wanted to say, "Hey! I looked for you! I wondered about you, specifically, for a long time! I wanted to know that you had made it out of that place, that you were living your life and that you're doing okay. I want to hear you say you are happy and free from everything that was holding you down."
But it all got stuck it my throat. It might not have been if it had indeed seemed like you had made it out. But here you were, waitressing in the Old Folks Paradise. You had been years ahead of us when we were twelve, but now you were just years ahead of us in old, in broken. I couldn't help but wonder what caused this, and yet I wasn't sure I wanted to know. You read like your soul had been dragged behind a pick-up on a cross-country trip. Too many of the wrong kind of guy? Rug pulled out from you back home, and you had to come back? Drugs? Something had happened, perhaps many somethings. And all the hope I had held out was rapidly melting into a slurry of acrylic nails and diner-waitress talk.
I just wanted to say, I had thought of you, and wondered about you. But the curiosity that had been pressing my heart forward had changed to alarm, and heartache, and it was all I could do to ask for some coffee, and open my mouth, bite my lip, and let you walk away again.
You walked up to our table as our server, hair peroxided, silver rings on eight of your fingers. I don't think I would have been more jolted had the bay that was crashing outside the window suddenly swallowed the whole place up. We greeted and hugged and acknowledged that we had not seen each other since high school graduation, three and a half years before. "You look good...it's been so long..." My voice caught in my throat, I couldn't ask you where you'd been, what you'd been doing with yourself. There was something so weary and broken about your appearance, despite the obvious upkeep that went into maintaining this waitress-chic look you had going for you.
I remember when you colored two strands of your naturally blond hair with a crayola marker in 6th grade. When you dated a boy who had been so much older than all of us when we were still crossing our fingers for breasts and periods. When you cried because he wasn't what he pretended to be. When you were rumored to be dating an older girl in the high school. You were different than the rest of us. Years ahead of us. I probably envied you at times, the flow you had, the way such exciting things rolled in and out of your life, the casual way you carried yourself, your creativity. You were beautiful, you were good to those around you, and you were real. I admired you. And as we both faded into the background of our small class, trying out different groups of friends and abandoning any obligation to the only and homogeneous group we had known since Kindergarten, we probably more or less forgot that each other existed.
It wasn't that we were ever exactly close, or that at the time I had been intent on the details of your life, but years later I remembered something about the root of your unhappiness in Southold, and how ready, ready, ready you were to leave. I was ready to leave, too. I understood that urgency. I wished great things for you. I never heard what became of you after they handed you that diploma. I heard you had gone to North Carolina.
So years later, I launched a mini-massive campaign, if such a thing could have ever been. I Facebooked every person with your (rather common) name whom seemed like they could maybe be you. Myspaced. Googled. And asked around like mad. None of these efforts turned up a lick of information.
I wanted to say this was you brought our water and took our orders. I wanted to explain that for a period in time I became consumed with the idea of knowing what you were doing, wondering if you ever made it out, hoping that you were far, far from where we started. I wasn't obsessed with this idea, I just wanted to know what happened in the next chapter. I wanted to say, "Hey! I looked for you! I wondered about you, specifically, for a long time! I wanted to know that you had made it out of that place, that you were living your life and that you're doing okay. I want to hear you say you are happy and free from everything that was holding you down."
But it all got stuck it my throat. It might not have been if it had indeed seemed like you had made it out. But here you were, waitressing in the Old Folks Paradise. You had been years ahead of us when we were twelve, but now you were just years ahead of us in old, in broken. I couldn't help but wonder what caused this, and yet I wasn't sure I wanted to know. You read like your soul had been dragged behind a pick-up on a cross-country trip. Too many of the wrong kind of guy? Rug pulled out from you back home, and you had to come back? Drugs? Something had happened, perhaps many somethings. And all the hope I had held out was rapidly melting into a slurry of acrylic nails and diner-waitress talk.
I just wanted to say, I had thought of you, and wondered about you. But the curiosity that had been pressing my heart forward had changed to alarm, and heartache, and it was all I could do to ask for some coffee, and open my mouth, bite my lip, and let you walk away again.