In the end, only kindness matters
So I have a story, an account if you will. It starts walking on
the Lake Bluff Beach under a full moon, hand in hand with Becky
Bauer. Now of course, a pause must be taken to consider this
situation, as it has considerable weight on the rest of the
story. A time when Becky and I could be caught in such an
intimate atmosphere, holding hands no less, obviously points to a time
that has practically become prehistoric to our Seniored selves as it
points to some time between seventh and eighth grade.
We were walking the shoreline linking fingers and knuckles and palms and talking about all that was happening in our changing lives. We weren't alone, Samantha and Stephanie were there of course as well. But until Becky got to this point in our conversation, they'd been talking amongst themselves as well. We were 13 at the very best, but Becky had always had a lot to say, and some of the things she said will always stick with me no matter what happens between us.
"Every person you meet is an oppurtunity to learn something," She was saying, and she went on to talk about the closeness between people and the way we lean on those bonds to feel human. Our arms swung lightly at our sides, the freezing night keeping them even tighter bound for heat. She talked about how she felt, personal things etc. all relating to this same point about these connections and their importance. I'm not kidding here, this entire thing happened no matter how dramatic it sounds.
So she spent all this time talking about it and I was almost zoned out on her voice. I was still registering everything she was saying, still letting it sink in, but completely focused on her dialogue. So she gets to this point about the pain of them being broken, the complete black awful that sets in, and she let go of my hand. She just did it, and we stopped walking and she stared at me while the cold hit my fingers. How can I explain how that felt? The total rush and cold and surprise and it was just that, it was just a complete black awful. A phenomon similar to the one where you stand in a doorframe pressing your arms hard against the side, hard as you can hard as you can till you think you're going to cry and every single muscle is screaming for release so you step out and cannot control the way they just float up. It's the best feeling, that one. But the point is, the feeling of her letting go was just as specific and memorable and REAL as that.
"That feeling you're feeling right now?" She says, looking up at me with those HUGE Becky eyes, made even larger by our youth, "That's the worst feeling you could feel...so just don't let go."
And it's stuff like that that won't leave you or fail to come up in your head from time to time. And it came up today and I couldn't stop playing it in my head. Caught in between the feeling of that complete black awful and of the free feeling from a door frame. The mixture is unexplainable, as distinct as the feeling of being burned on one side of you and the other being dunked in ice water. You wouldn't think that something so good as feeling weightless and so awful as feeling suffocated with pain could possibly coexist, but here they are just DOING it.
I made the announcement in the car yesterday to Steph and Beth and Abbe, the decision and the new plan, not just plan but something more real. Steph is stoned, duh, but it doesn't take away the validity of what she said. Instead it just fueled her instinct to explain more, something often interpreted as rambling but in this case was purely constructive.
Exerpt: "You've sat and invested so much emotion and time into something and you're just going to let it die completely unresolved?" My current state of sobriety doesn't allow me the luxury of a decent monologue reconstruction, for my instinct to explain more is far less stimulated than hers was at the time.
And the hands and the letting go and and the death without resolve the weightlessness and the complete black awful can be boiled down to this one thing that I come to with blood and tears shed over it:
Just forget me. It's that simple.
We were walking the shoreline linking fingers and knuckles and palms and talking about all that was happening in our changing lives. We weren't alone, Samantha and Stephanie were there of course as well. But until Becky got to this point in our conversation, they'd been talking amongst themselves as well. We were 13 at the very best, but Becky had always had a lot to say, and some of the things she said will always stick with me no matter what happens between us.
"Every person you meet is an oppurtunity to learn something," She was saying, and she went on to talk about the closeness between people and the way we lean on those bonds to feel human. Our arms swung lightly at our sides, the freezing night keeping them even tighter bound for heat. She talked about how she felt, personal things etc. all relating to this same point about these connections and their importance. I'm not kidding here, this entire thing happened no matter how dramatic it sounds.
So she spent all this time talking about it and I was almost zoned out on her voice. I was still registering everything she was saying, still letting it sink in, but completely focused on her dialogue. So she gets to this point about the pain of them being broken, the complete black awful that sets in, and she let go of my hand. She just did it, and we stopped walking and she stared at me while the cold hit my fingers. How can I explain how that felt? The total rush and cold and surprise and it was just that, it was just a complete black awful. A phenomon similar to the one where you stand in a doorframe pressing your arms hard against the side, hard as you can hard as you can till you think you're going to cry and every single muscle is screaming for release so you step out and cannot control the way they just float up. It's the best feeling, that one. But the point is, the feeling of her letting go was just as specific and memorable and REAL as that.
"That feeling you're feeling right now?" She says, looking up at me with those HUGE Becky eyes, made even larger by our youth, "That's the worst feeling you could feel...so just don't let go."
And it's stuff like that that won't leave you or fail to come up in your head from time to time. And it came up today and I couldn't stop playing it in my head. Caught in between the feeling of that complete black awful and of the free feeling from a door frame. The mixture is unexplainable, as distinct as the feeling of being burned on one side of you and the other being dunked in ice water. You wouldn't think that something so good as feeling weightless and so awful as feeling suffocated with pain could possibly coexist, but here they are just DOING it.
I made the announcement in the car yesterday to Steph and Beth and Abbe, the decision and the new plan, not just plan but something more real. Steph is stoned, duh, but it doesn't take away the validity of what she said. Instead it just fueled her instinct to explain more, something often interpreted as rambling but in this case was purely constructive.
Exerpt: "You've sat and invested so much emotion and time into something and you're just going to let it die completely unresolved?" My current state of sobriety doesn't allow me the luxury of a decent monologue reconstruction, for my instinct to explain more is far less stimulated than hers was at the time.
And the hands and the letting go and and the death without resolve the weightlessness and the complete black awful can be boiled down to this one thing that I come to with blood and tears shed over it:
Just forget me. It's that simple.