tuesday
\nafter a reckless and used day
\ni was running and running
\nwithout a chance
\nto stop and chat at the sky<\/i><\/p>\n
I must have been about eleven. Gabe and Tim were my best friends; Tim was a friend I had made during the first trip to France, and Gabe had been my friend long before then, when we were neighbors on Euclid road, riding our BMXs together, swinging on the glider in the backyard, co-building massive cities from puny Legos. I had always been inseparable from my best friends. I wasn’t the most gregarious child in the world; quite the opposite in fact, so the friends that I did make and that did enjoy the same things and have the same sense of humor (not a stretch when you’re seven or eight) were my friends for life. Or so I thought…<\/p>\n
I had told myself certain things, built up these conceptions in my mind as an eleven year-old about what a best friend should be. They should be into Legos, first of all, preferably into planes or cars or something cool like that, maybe computers a little bit, and (this was the crux) I should be able to think to myself, and have it ring true, “This is my best friend,” when I was around them. I had come to these conclusions in France, and in between the comings and goings for Christmastime, spending time with Tim, and then time with Gabe, it began to come over me that I didn’t think the same way about my friendship with Tim as I did with Gabe’s. Tim and I went to the same school, and while they had the foresight not to place us in the same class, whenever the bell for recess would ring we would gravitate towards one another across the playground, play marbles or paper airplanes, or just play games working our way around the gnarled roots of the olive trees in the courtyard, jutting up from the asphalt. We both had a profound amusement for silly words, and could talk about absolutely anything, from girls we kinda liked to the possibilities of infinities and black holes and celestial things… I’ve never had anything quite like it, before or since. It was Tim around whom that mindset was built, since it was during the sleepovers at his house, when the lights were dark and sleep was imminent, that I would think, “This is my best friend.”<\/p>\n
We returned from the first sojourn in August of 1989. Gabe and I picked up where we left off, while I sent letters to Tim detailing the important matters I was engaged in: which Lego planes I had constructed lately, what movies I’d seen, vacations the family had been on, and the like. Gabe and I still got along famously–we played with Legos, dabbled in video games, jumped on his new trampoline, had water gun fights in the summer, and went trick-or-treating on Halloween (he was an army commando that year; I was a lobster). But as fifth grade passed and on into sixth grade, something began creeping over my mind that things weren’t the same. <\/p>\n
Things weren’t the same in so many ways already–I had more responsibility, my interests were shifting somewhat, and I was being homeschooled. This in itself didn’t cause a rift in our friendship, but middle school is educational, so to speak, on so much more than an academic level: it’s three years of hormonal chaos, a ramping-up into high school, and one’s environment and the issues pressed into discussion have a real bearing on one’s outlook, at least during that limbo period. Gabe was in that environment; I wasn’t, and through those years, while the fundamental tenets of our friendship didn’t change, we both acquired a gloss through our respective climates that we didn’t have the maturity to see through, and while things may not altered perceptively on his end, the things that he was beginning to enjoy, the movies that he would encourage me to watch with him, the music that he was listening to, while new and exciting when we were together, began to alienate me in subtle ways during my private musings. And my paradigm would return–I would ask myself, “Do I say to myself, ‘This is my best friend,’ when I’m around him?”<\/p>\n
Middle schoolers have the capability to be more emotionally ruthless than any adult, especially since, to begin with, they and their peers are so impressionable. I remember making a concrete decision, finalizing the matter in my mind: Gabe and I weren’t best friends anymore. In my limited concept of friendship and through the nature of my introverted personality, not being best friends meant that we couldn’t be friends at all, and through it all I set myself adrift from any real friendships for a long, long time.<\/p>\n
We visited Gabe and his family one day after school. He had a bedroom downstairs, near the kitchen, and close to the washer and dryer. Sometimes during sleepovers his mom would run the dryer into the night and I would hear the tick, tick<\/i> of jeans or the like going round and round as it dried, just outside Gabe’s door. He had boxes of comic books on the floor, all delicately enveloped in plastic sleeves, a red Lego helicopter perched on top of a dresser, an ever-growing cd collection, and a few stuffed animals scattered around, vestiges of a quickly-fading boyhood. I didn’t know what to do. It was an arbitary decision I had made one day, and I wasn’t even that conflicted about it. So I didn’t tell him anything. It was the worst thing I could have done, and I could see it in his eyes afterwards for years. He tried to make conversation, ask me how I was, what I was up to, not in the grown-up sense, but asking me about things that really mattered and telling me about his new exploits in this or that, about his friends at school, about the new storyline in the latest Iron Man<\/i>, my favorite comic book… I took a few pokes at his conversation, but eventually said, “I think I’ll go see what everybody else is doing.” I walked out into the kitchen, where my mom was talking to his, stood around for a while and got a drink of water. During a lull in the conversation, though, my mom turned to me, looked at me with the mildest of inquisitive expressions on her face, and said, “Why don’t you go see what Gabe is up to?” I wandered back into the bedroom where he had found something to do, but was slowly beginning realize what was happening. There was no precedent for it. I made halfhearted conversation with him for a while longer, then did the only thing my infinitely wise adolescent mind could think to do–I walked back out to the kitchen and hung about. I don’t know how long it carried on–until we left, I think, and I apologized to him much, much later, but I turn my eyes away and stare at emptiness whenever I come back to that event now.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to forget these things. I need to capture them before they evaporate into my subconscious, though they’re already there, I want to grasp them with my mind and unfurl their meaning and resonance. I need to if I’m going to be a father one day.<\/p>\n
day set
\nscatters of clouds in the distance
\nthey whitewash the backdrop of secrets
\nwhispering shadows of blue
\nin more delicate hues<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
tuesday after a reckless and used day i was running and running without a chance to stop and chat at the sky<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}