She was
the most intense, bizarre person I'd ever
met. One year ahead of me in high school, different
and
smart as hell.
I never did work out how we came to be friends,
but we were, and I came to depend on her. We became
each others' sounding boards, editors, critics.
Comparing, sharing essays, reports, free verse. I'd
critique, she'd comment. I delighted in her difference,
the way it conferred an eccentric status to me. She
delighted in...actually, I'm not sure quite why I
fascinated her.
It was a sort of mutual
hero worship.
Then I pissed her off, or she pissed me
off, or somehow we weren't talking anymore. She graduated
and went overseas to study, I stayed behind and finished
high school. I'd miss her in an odd, fleeting sort of
way, a blip on my memory, an old essay resurfacing.
The card she sent me by way of renewing the friendship:
A little girl stands with her nose pressed up
against the glass of a full wall aquarium.
Inside,
there is one sentence in a blank white expanse:
Let us not look back in anger nor
forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber.
Cryptic, but I'll
take it.