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by Jerry Whorebach 10/05/2006, 10:38pm PDT |
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Found this today during an... unrelated search. She's the first one up, with the bad blonde dye job. It used to be purple.
We met when we were twelve. My family had just moved from one rural area to another one just like it on the other side of the province. Their last crazy get-rich-quick scheme had failed spactacularly, so they must have felt it important to get right back on the crazy horse and try another. An isolated community where noone knew them was exactly what the crazy doctor ordered. The real doctor ordered lithium, but what did he know? Any diagnosis he made must have been based on an elaborate web of misinformation. Dad was always good at that.
I had been struggling to fit in at the last public school despite my constant unease around other human beings. I was even starting to have conversations, albeit with the black kid and the stoner (bizarrely enough for that day and age, the school only had one of each). Starting a new school in November proved more than I could handle.
I can't remember if I lasted one day or two, but I can remember the terror that gripped me as I sat in that darkened room, surrounded by that quivering biomass. I remember feeling it breathe... smelling it sweat... hearing it squeal with delight at the comedy stylings of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. It was fuck-the-education, let's-watch-a-movie day and I was supposed to enjoy for it, as they told me, didn't get any better than that.
I don't remember meeting her then, but apparently I did. All of their faces just looked like crude approximations of what I saw on television. No matter how they distorted their features, baring their teeth or furrowing their brows, I could no more identify them with myself than I could a face from the newspaper captured on a wad of Silly Putty.
She lived at the bottom of the hill. One day she showed up at my door and invited me for a walk. We saw each other nearly every day after that, for three years. No ordinary girl would have put up with me - I think I managed to telephone her only a handful of times. She was persistent. No matter how far I retreated, she was always there to draw me back out.
It was on that lush and verdant island that my mother left my father, after a particularly nasty break from reality saw him involuntarily committed. They both went their separate ways, taking me with them.
I was fifteen the spring I said goodbye to her. My parents told me we'd return in the fall. That's what I told her, even though I knew it was untrue. It wasn't my fault she put her trust in a madman.
I wish I had more memories of her. There were a few years when I tried to forget, and I'm afraid I mostly succeeded. Seeing her again today, the human embodiment of my life as it was, as I fantasize it could have been, degraded by cumreceptacle.com, the mechanical embodiment of my life as it is today... it feels like my existence has come full circle, and begun to consume itself.
Fun Fact: Her dad thought I looked like Fred Savage. I suspect he had never seen a Jew before. |
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