I met C the first week of college, in that first semester that seemed like an endless game of cultural catch-up. My classmates all seemed to know each other from some summer dance/writing/theater program and would make offhanded references to people like Maya Deren that I now know were anything but offhanded. I'm told I seemed surly back then but underneath it I was just a sponge, hungry to become one of those people who "knew from stuff." C's style was impossibly perfect and our first conversation was about her trouble finding a good dry cleaner near campus. A dry cleaner! I was a raver whose jean bottoms were frayed from scissors and I was flattered that she'd even pretended I might have an opinion on the matter.
C would say the most jaw-dropping things with a wide eyed guilelessness that, it took me four years to realize, wasn’t an affect at all. One time as I was finishing up my lunch she shuffled up to my table and within five minutes she was telling me about her brief stint as a stripper, which ended when the management informed her that she couldn't actually turn down lap dances. "I mean, gross, you know? They can't expect me to do that to those guys, lap dances," she said matter-of-factly in between bites of frozen yogurt. I watched her like television. You didn't hang out with C, she just kind of happened to you from time to time.
She started dating the son of a TV director who was a year ahead of us. He was friendly in that chatty LA way but had the livewire energy of a snake set to strike. They were always together; she would make him give a ride to any student they saw walking down the main avenue lugging bags. Once my friend Laura described how earlier that day she'd seen C sneak up on him on the lawn and how gracefully she had leaped forward and wrapped her arms around him from behind. I remember watching her point a banana at him like a gun, squinting from behind her hand. They were sweet together, and also they were on drugs.
Our last conversation was one of those "we don't hang out enough but we've always been friends, you know?" talks that people have in the weeks before graduating. She died two years later and I still think of her at least once a year. When I do, I get just as sad as I was when I first learned that she’d overdosed — even just writing this makes my stomach feel like it’s full of ice. We were never even particularly close. Isn’t it funny who stays with you? In my half-baked theory about the afterlife, when you die your reward is returning to the primordial soup with absolutely no sense of who you were. You take the love with you, but all of life's slights and your earthly sense of self is totally forgotten. Freedom from the everyday idiocy of pride seems like the greatest gift you could get. I guess that would mean C. doesn't know she's still thought about by me or by anyone. But she is, and what I'm thinking right now is the world is less interesting without her in it and at a certain time in a certain place, she was leading by example.
2 comments:
Well, damn.... Ok that one got me.
Don't stop writing these. It might just be two a.m. or I might have known someone like that once. But either way, you nailed it, xo
Hey, thanks! I worry that I get too Live Journal-y on posts sometimes but then I remember that I started this blog to be an outlet for my random fixations.
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