10:10 p.m. - 2003-11-26
she's crafty
every so often, when i'm at my old house in atlanta, i tend to flip through high school yearbooks on a lark. every time it's more jarring, i think - faces and names push their way to the surface and i know they used to mean something but i do not remember what it was. was such-and-such a decent sort of fellow? a jerk? did he pick on me? did i ever interact with him at all? maybe he went out with so-and-so.
and then comes your face and you completely magnetize my eye - actually, you would call it a hypnotized eye - to the page, even as my mother, passing through the room asks if i see anyone i remember and i mumble something noncommital, i am trying not to stare at you. it's you before i knew you, a picture that has not become familiar on repeated viewings, a picture that only says what it says, which is, here is sara scott - remember her?
and i do remember her, in a flood, all of a sudden. she was the first person to be a crush and also a budding friend at the same exact time, a pattern i am used to now but was clumsy at handling then - clumsy as with many things. cute what-ifs play inside my head - perhaps if i had been as cool then as i am now, worldly in a way that my geek high school life had never prepared me to be but which she seemed to have already attained by sheer divine intervention. i really was fond of her, and of course she did not know what to do with such a silly thing but we became an odd sort of friends anyway. certainly we never kept up for long after high school, and i now lack the resources with which to adequately track her down. i wish i could - so often seeing 'high school people' is an inane rehash of the past, a retelling of old jokes for old time's sake. but i feel as if sara and i would actually have new things to say to one another, and that would be worth my time in itself.
sara, i do hope life has treated you well these last three years. you were a good soul, and while i was drawn to you by your outrageous ways, vintage bug, and so forth, i stuck after you because you had the resources to be full of life against many odds, and a creative soul, and you honestly seemed to think i was an all right sort of kid. i loved you in what ways that i knew to at the time, and i owe you one.
chawalawalawalawaleng.
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