Our Years
14 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Musings Tags: Better Than Ezra, Friendship goodbye
There is so much to say and yet the words I am able to craft here will never be quite enough. Plainly put in the most direct way, a friendship has died. It was as pure and important as faith in God. As all-encompassing and soul crushing as first love and as beautiful and brief as a shooting star. This goodbye like so many that I have had to make in the past two years is tearing me to shreds. Mostly because with it I am having to say goodbye to a part of myself that I love. We shaped each other and we became who we would be and sealed where we came from all in one indiscernible loop. We were driftwood when we found each other, lost in the sea of adolescence searching for an identity and somewhere to belong. We sanded ourselves the same way and we built a fortress with each other and soon these three pieces of driftwood were pillars in the sand. Marking our places on the shore firmly and proudly, our eyes set west toward the brink of the future. I am suffering a heartbreak to look back at my teen years that were woven from hope and drunk on possibility and that were so sure of themselves. Those years knew what the world said about time like them, that they would be outrun and forced to grow up. But our years new better, our years were invincible and we would never end. Those adults were fools that lost sight of who they were when they were closer to being themselves then any other time. Those people that let the relationships that shaped them dwindle and fade like a fire after dawn. Those idiots didn’t have what we had. We knew it then that something between us was special. We thought about getting a matching tattoo to notarize it. But then how can you sum up what it was that we had in one image or word? We didn’t need it and we never could decide. I think I stayed true to that intention as best as a wooden post can stay unaffected by the incoming tide. I’ve sustained some gashes and graffiti and I’m a little warped beneath the surface but I am still more or less in the same place. That post that planted itself beside me that Thanksgiving break all those low tides ago was made of something different. Not so deeply rooted in what I thought was an eternal beach deep, she uprooted, traveled away, was stripped and refinished and made into a mast of a shiner ship that sails by me sometimes but never stops to get out and stand with me facing outward looking at the horizon for all the worlds beauty and promise. It wasn’t just the two of us there. There was a third stake in the sand yet again made of something entirely different. She is standing facing outward like me boasting her own with splinters and bird droppings and other things. She still is in view though a little ways down the beach now and tonight as the sun set we saw the fancy ship sail out of sight for what might be the last time. We watched it for awhile even though in the ship’s silhouette we could no longer distinguish our friend from it’s mast and sails. It is an entirely new thing she has become. What can you do as a post in the sand? Not much but feel the water rushing in and out rooting you deeper to the place that you have come to be and hope that your friend is happy. I find myself wondering if now I wish we had gotten that tattoo. At first thought it seems like a good avoidance of a sure regret, but I don’t know. Under all of life’s scars and markings I think it would feel good to know that it is there.
“We were standing on the hood of your car, singing out loud when the sun came up.”
