August 19, 2003
Fabulous Four
I don't like my hands. They're small, short fingered, torn nails. But I like them when I'm driving, casual on the steering wheel, potent. They seem quite capable of anything, just then.
So I was driving down Bridgetown Road, listening to Jeff Buckley's 'Lover, You Should've Come Over', and I was thinking, yes, I could, but I can't. I make silent, silly little vows to myself and hold desperately fast to them, shaking with my wanting of just the opposite. He needs his night to play video games, and I need a couple of hours with my computer and my floundering novel. I wrote three pages, a triumph indeed. I called him a few moments ago only to have him rub the phone against his hair (a nails-on-the-chalkboard sound, to be sure) for no apparent reason. The conversation was brief, clapped closed with i-love-yous and promises of seeing eachother tomorrow.
He doesn't know how I can want to talk to him everyday. Such a strange and solitary creature, is this man I love.
Though, I know he misses me when he wakes up in the morning with only his own legs tangled in the sheets...
I celebrated Kelsi's birthday today with Cassy and Clare, and pistachio cake. The four of us sat on the new squishy brown leather couches, and the furniture was not the only thing that had changed. Clare's face is still dubious and freckle spottted, Cassy is still prone to giggling, however tamed from what it once was. Kelsi's presence is slight, her manner observant. I'm still in turns awkward and outlandish.
But we have these pursuits, these little lives we've fashioned away from eachother. We have secrets, now, that we can't tell. And yet, as we curled there, our stomachs full of shrimp scampi and said cake, I realized that none of the comfort had left our friendship, none of the familiarity and the instant, sparkling ease. Cassy would still walk around in her underwear, I would still talk about sex, Kels would still read to us from her stories for hours, Clare would still laugh at all the right moments and embrace at all the others. I miss them, and I am only aware of it when we are together.
Friends are too few. I should not squander what I have been fortunate to hold. I always thought I could never be as close as the three of them were, cousins, lifelong playmates. But I felt, today, that I was, that I really always had been. Our spirits were warm and mutual in the living room, and our future plans were made with a determination that may prove to be true.
I don't miss being young, I said. I don't miss my irreverent adolescence, our impossible dreams and our discoveries. I don't miss wanting and not having, I don't miss not-knowing and seemingly impossible of knowledge.
But I like to have it to think about. I do. My dear friends, you have shaped me.
astera at 11:04 p.m.