The Record: Red
I’m up on the hillside behind our house, looking out at our small city. I’m young, so it seems that the city is large.
I’ve just had sex for the first time, and I’m crying.
But I’m crying because of her, not him.
She’s my best friend, the best best friend. But she’s religious, too, which I never considered. She, the Mormon, and me, the fool.
I look at the lights.
I wish I’d never done it.
She’s somewhere out there on the other side of town, and I imagine her regretting our friendship. The thought shatters me.
Soon, I face the new day with dread. I lie there and try to figure out how to fix it.
We talk. She doesn’t hate me. But she doesn’t know if she can be friends with someone who’s having sex at my age. I cry, and she cries.
Somewhere in there is her mother’s handiwork, I suspect, because I know she told her. I also know her mother loves me; not in a Jennifer is such a pistol kind of way, but in a familial sort of way. She understands that there’s no mother for me, despite the presence of the woman who sits on our couch all day.
And I don’t know how I know it, but she’s given my friend some very good, and very difficult, counsel.
The next time I go up to the hillside, I can breathe again. I haven’t ruined all. I stand there and take in the PG&E show.
I got lucky.
I fooled her somehow. Not on purpose. But I’m just not as… good as she is.
I guard this secret.
The Record: Born to Be My Baby
We’re friends for the first half of high school, and it’s straight-up glorious. We drive around blasting our music, singing in the car. We are totally obnoxious.
But somewhere there’s a split, and it creates an enormous chasm between us.
Now, I’m still young, I hate the idea of marriage, and I don’t feel particularly close with the person about to take her vows. I don’t even respond no when I get the invitation. I think it’s insane, what she’s about to embark upon.
I throw the invitation away.
A year later she calls me. She wants to know what happened, why I never showed.
I tell her it was on purpose, that I didn’t want to go.
Later, she wants to know why she wasn’t invited to my wedding.
I tell her it wasn’t important to me that she comes, that I didn’t think she would come anyways.
She hangs up on me.
This time, many years pass, and the next time she calls, she doesn’t hang up the phone. She listens to my apology.
We meet up on one of her trips home. And it’s almost like we never left each other.
We each share our adoption stories, something we unexpectedly have in common. Without that dialog, I’m not sure if we’ll get very far.
But we do.
The Record: Tix
I have them all laid out; concert tickets spread across my kitchen table, 21 in all.
Flashes in my mind of Sammy and Steven and Sebastian. I hear the screaming in my ears, the sound of my own voice as it bounces off the others in the crowd.
She and I are far enough away to be safe, and close enough to be at risk, when the pyro starts.
We’re part of a wave of human contact, the rippling of bodies as the music covers the crowd like an undulating fabric, knitting us all together, hot and sweaty and full of rage and wonder and sex.
We plan it for weeks, sometimes months. There’s always the before-show prep; hair and makeup and tight tank tops. Extra eyeliner if it’s Motley Crue.
Goddamn, that’s a good show. My father drives us, and he stays in the stands as Tommy Lee floats across the sky on his airborne drum kit.
Our parents think we’re safe; smart, even. We don’t drink. We don’t do drugs.
But they don’t know how stupid we really are.
After a show, heading back to a singer’s apartment with his girlfriend in-tow.
Showing up at a stranger’s house filled with junior-college-aged boys, the girls spaced out as they watch The Wall.
Staying for hours in the cold of Oakland, wishing for a chance to meet someone, anyone.
My eyes scan the tickets, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992.
Each one of these $18.50 slips represents an awesome time she and I had together. They’re in the light again after three decades in my mother’s old jewelry box. The words will fade if I leave them in the sun for long. I stack them up and take them from the table.
I resolve never to let them fall into obscurity again.
Dear Readers,
Throughout my life there have been many best friends. Each one means something different to me. Some go. Some stay stubbornly by my side. Other friendships break, heal, and break again. This friendship was once shattered; I truly believed I would never speak to her again, not because I didn’t love her, but I just couldn’t figure out how to love her in a way that didn’t hurt her.
But with her, I really lucked out. She sought me out one day long after we’d broken up, and we’ve never looked back.
There have been others, of course, but the two of us were just batshit crazy together because she is batshit crazy just like I am batshit crazy. Two nuts.
These days, I don’t see her often, but I feel her there a few states away. It’s difficult to come up with a way to say that she was the best or the first or the one who loved me most. She was all of these things, just as new people, and even people who came before her, have also been all of these things. There isn’t a favorite, but she is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the original. There’s no one like her in the world, and there’s no one like her in my heart.
XO
Jen
Beautiful.