Turn the Page
My longest standing homette got married just a little while ago and recently returned from her honeymoon. I decided to give her a call to chat. She wasn't there so the answering machine picked up. Her voice came on and announced her first and last name for the person leaving the message. That last name... possibly the last time I'll hear it.
Her myspace photo is now of her looking whipped in the wee hours, drinking from two fruity drinks at once in a dimly lit room wearing jogging clothes. She always was casual. Brought to mind years ago. All of our friends rolling out at 4am or so, heading over to IHOP so that we could crash on full stomachs. I suppose that can still happen, but not really. At some level I've never been willing to let go of that moment. We're all laughing. Everyone else is asleep. Benny's house has been eaten clean. Monster ball has been played. Movies have been watched. IHOP will let us see each other a little while longer. Tell a couple more jokes. Just enjoy all of my blood friends until the sun shines in, the world wakes up, and we go slumber to avoid them until out time, when the masquerade of the night creatures can begin again.
I was a little bit offended that she didn't invite me on her honeymoon! It'd be like old times. Her, her boy, and me. Naturally we'd need to call up Dooba. Doesn't this punk remember the drill?
Oh yeah, he doesn't remember. He never even knew it to forget it. It wasn't their drill. It was our drill. They have their own ways, and I don't know them. We've become so disattached that I can't even relate to the person who she's married to. I knew when I gave her a hug last time we chilled that our time was limited.
I can remember having to tell her, honestly, that she and her b/f of four years, one of my closest friends (and still close), should probably be apart. We were alone on the front steps of my house. It was a little after midnight. I had taken her side over and against him. Now he's still like family while she and I rarely speak. There was no other way for it to turn out. I knew them as a unit and it's still bloody weird to think of them otherwise, even after so much time has elapsed. Even after I blessed the division.
Besides, we both knew it wasn't just a breakup. She was leaving the tribe. I knew what I was saying to her. The tribe wasn't healthy for her. It was dissolving into parts anyway, more through circumstance than bad blood. We were close that night, and we would be once again, but she'd grown distant.
I went to IHOP last Saturday morning to try and live in the afterglow of my thoughts. They weren't there. I was there. New Yorkers were there. The line was long, the food was fast, I sat alone, I got the check in minutes. It was 10am, not 4. The yuppie colony was already scurrying about, whining, driving nice cars.
Don't know that it would matter if we were there anyway. A couple of us are professional religious folks now, some are doctors, a lawyer, professor or two, pair of teachers, building contractor, a cop. It's not that we don't still have a latent affection for one another, but you can't just recapture the scenario through force of will. We can't be sitting there, scholarship university careers in front of us, revving to go. That's gone, and it isn't just profession. We've become different sorts of people with radically divergent views on life, God, politics, family, and all of those things that define us deeply.
Oddly enough I think we've diverged more than most groups precisely because we were so similar in one sense - we were very open-minded. We each evaluated the entire spectrum of options before coming to our conclusions, and were then dedicated to the rightness of the conclusions we'd reached. Some of us eventually decided that only God held the answers to life and its mysteries. Others came to the conclusion that we must yell carpe diem! and ring what sap we could from the tree of life before we became its fertilizer. It was the same character that led both ways, and to a number of gradations in between.
But you know, perhaps the bottom line is that we'd wuss out way before 4 these days.
4am bedtime priorities are different than 11pm bedtime priorites.
Another chapter closes. Like Seger said, 'here I go, turn the page'. I guess I'm behind the times. So many pages have turned. I should have bought a new book by now.
Her myspace photo is now of her looking whipped in the wee hours, drinking from two fruity drinks at once in a dimly lit room wearing jogging clothes. She always was casual. Brought to mind years ago. All of our friends rolling out at 4am or so, heading over to IHOP so that we could crash on full stomachs. I suppose that can still happen, but not really. At some level I've never been willing to let go of that moment. We're all laughing. Everyone else is asleep. Benny's house has been eaten clean. Monster ball has been played. Movies have been watched. IHOP will let us see each other a little while longer. Tell a couple more jokes. Just enjoy all of my blood friends until the sun shines in, the world wakes up, and we go slumber to avoid them until out time, when the masquerade of the night creatures can begin again.
I was a little bit offended that she didn't invite me on her honeymoon! It'd be like old times. Her, her boy, and me. Naturally we'd need to call up Dooba. Doesn't this punk remember the drill?
Oh yeah, he doesn't remember. He never even knew it to forget it. It wasn't their drill. It was our drill. They have their own ways, and I don't know them. We've become so disattached that I can't even relate to the person who she's married to. I knew when I gave her a hug last time we chilled that our time was limited.
I can remember having to tell her, honestly, that she and her b/f of four years, one of my closest friends (and still close), should probably be apart. We were alone on the front steps of my house. It was a little after midnight. I had taken her side over and against him. Now he's still like family while she and I rarely speak. There was no other way for it to turn out. I knew them as a unit and it's still bloody weird to think of them otherwise, even after so much time has elapsed. Even after I blessed the division.
Besides, we both knew it wasn't just a breakup. She was leaving the tribe. I knew what I was saying to her. The tribe wasn't healthy for her. It was dissolving into parts anyway, more through circumstance than bad blood. We were close that night, and we would be once again, but she'd grown distant.
I went to IHOP last Saturday morning to try and live in the afterglow of my thoughts. They weren't there. I was there. New Yorkers were there. The line was long, the food was fast, I sat alone, I got the check in minutes. It was 10am, not 4. The yuppie colony was already scurrying about, whining, driving nice cars.
Don't know that it would matter if we were there anyway. A couple of us are professional religious folks now, some are doctors, a lawyer, professor or two, pair of teachers, building contractor, a cop. It's not that we don't still have a latent affection for one another, but you can't just recapture the scenario through force of will. We can't be sitting there, scholarship university careers in front of us, revving to go. That's gone, and it isn't just profession. We've become different sorts of people with radically divergent views on life, God, politics, family, and all of those things that define us deeply.
Oddly enough I think we've diverged more than most groups precisely because we were so similar in one sense - we were very open-minded. We each evaluated the entire spectrum of options before coming to our conclusions, and were then dedicated to the rightness of the conclusions we'd reached. Some of us eventually decided that only God held the answers to life and its mysteries. Others came to the conclusion that we must yell carpe diem! and ring what sap we could from the tree of life before we became its fertilizer. It was the same character that led both ways, and to a number of gradations in between.
But you know, perhaps the bottom line is that we'd wuss out way before 4 these days.
4am bedtime priorities are different than 11pm bedtime priorites.
Another chapter closes. Like Seger said, 'here I go, turn the page'. I guess I'm behind the times. So many pages have turned. I should have bought a new book by now.
posted by Roland at 6:54 AM
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