I remember when we first met. It wasn't that memorable of a meeting so I'm sure I've embroidered it along the way, polished it up after it was tarnished for the first few years. You were unremarkable then. We were unremarkable then. The bar springs easily to mind, as I frequented in those days. I can feel the heaviness in the air, hear the jostle of the young crowd, feel their shoulders bump up against me as I push towards the bar. All that is clear from repeated viewings, but then the night took a very small turn. An unremarkable turn, except for you. I didn't know it then. You were talking with June, probably trying to get into her pants. It's all you thought about those days, you admitted it to me yourself. Her face is of the time, but yours always comes from later on in our relationship, some anachronism from the future.
It was June that waved to me, no doubt trying to escape your attentions. So I came over and we talked. You introduced yourself and I promptly forgot your name. I remember I forgot your name because the next time we met I did my best to dance around your name so my ignorance wouldn't be revealed. But that first night, when I came over to talk to June you quickly faded away. I smile when I think about how young you were then, how easily deterred. I can hardly imagine what you were like then, a boy fresh out of high school still enamoured with the new world that bars had opened up to you. You were in love with the mess of people I think, and the loose morals that the liquor required. To think of you this way seems almost heretical. I know you would protest the word but it is the closest approximation I can pull out of my brain.
I don't remember how you came to be in our group. My guess is, and I apologise if I'm off, but my guess is that you just started to tag along because you thought we were cool. We were after all upper-classmen. We could, and quite often did, quote Nietzsche, and Marx. We had read Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Some of us were even writing poetry that had been published in anthologies. I can see how that would have been impressive to a young man fresh out of high school. I remember you on the outskirts of our little circle well we drank absinthe and smoked our clove cigarettes. And talk until we got kicked out about all manner of 'intellectual' things. Hell, we were infatuated with ourselves and we half knew the lie that sat under our intellectualism. I can see why you found us attractive, as straightforward and sincere as you are.
And when you got back from that trip, oh that trip. What it did to you I'll never know. Not just because you won't tell me, but it scored deep. Somewhere so deep I can't, no maybe won't, go. It scares me sometimes. It scares me that somewhere someone touched you that deep. It scares me to think that someday someone will reach down there in me and touch me too.
The first time I saw you after you came home: that is a meeting I will never forget. This time the setting is hazy. Once again we were at a bar I believe. I was there with some of my friends and I saw you come in the door. Even from that distance, sitting half way across the room, I could see that you changed. I wasn't sure how, but I knew. It wasn't that I couldn’t put my finger on what had changed about you, like when someone gets a haircut and there's this nagging thought in the back of your brain saying something has changed, it was that the change was so big that I couldn't comprehend it. Not in the first five minutes anyway.
Does it catch your imagination?
