Music: Communication Breakdown ~ Led Zeppelin
Burritos and pickles.
Seems to be the best way to start this out. I am presently eating a burrito and a buch of pickles.
This would be breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the day. I so rock.
Trick is, I only have one of these days when I think of someone whom I once looked at as one of the greatest and most influential people I have ever known. Then she got all strange.
It would seem that she did, at one point, have some kind of "thing" for me. This was several years ago, and seeing as how I was talking to someone else at the time, I was, ovbiously, kind of distracted.
So, our relationship took a different path when she realized that I was not interested in whatever it was that she wanted. We eventually ended up being like the brother and sister who actually like each other enough to talk and have fun together. Those were some good times, let me tell you.
Then one day, she became very adamant that I get out of the lousy job that we both hated. She decided that I should do what she did, and, trusting her judgement combined with the fact that I actually liked the idea, I did just that. This other job involved my reloacting to South Carolina, and her to Missouri. We were both sad about that, so we resolved to write constantly to each other. Which we did a pretty good job of.
It was round about the fourth week that I was there that I wound up getting injured to the point where I needed to just get out of that particular industry. It was mentioned in a letter that things had not worked out for me like we had hoped and planned, and that I was returning to Indiana.
She was not really okay with that, but once she realized that, physically, I could not carry on, she accepted it. She told me that she was proud of the fact that I had put forth the effort, and that she would support me, no matter what. Just so long as I did not go back to the crappy dead end job.
I went back to Indiana 3 weeks later.
Four more weeks pass.
In those four weeks, I had applied at nearly 30 places. No one was hiring. My money from the summer trip was working on running out, and the only place that was hiring was the one I really did not want to go back to.
Needless to say, I went back.
Shortly thereafter, she just stopped writing to me altogether.
It was just an abrupt thing.
I was talking to the lady who was her best friend for a long time tonight and she made some comments that suddenly made this whole thing make a lot more sense.
It was, it seemed, because of some letter I wrote to her after I got back. So, I started thinking about all the things I wrote, and this little memory of this odd little event suddenly popped back into my head.
It was a little word game. Some guy I had met had gotten a letter from his daughter who was like four, and he could not make out what it was, so, he asked if I could help him out. I said "sure, whatever, can I see it?" He would not show me the actual letter, which was okay. He took my notebook from me, opened it to some random page and drew it in the corner.
It was a series of words written vertially on the page with no spacing and the letters mirrored and set against the originals. If you covered the right side from the center out, and then read from top to bottom you got the message.
It now makes sense to assume that she got that page somewhere and I just did not relize that I had used it. It probably wound up on the back somewhere, or some such. Either way, it was enough for her to decide to ignore me for the seemingly rest of our lives.
At first, it was kind of depressing, but after a bit, I got over it. I still think about it from time to time, but suddenly, I can see what is going on. It saddens me that she never tried to solve the problem, but she was always kind of odd. Much like me.
So, yeah. People think that I had never lost anyone close to me. Well, they are wrong. I feel like in losing her, I lost a sister. Almost exactly a year before I really did lose a real sister. The way it worked out was that in my mind, she had died. She was not going to be her usually happy and cheerful self at work ever again, because she was never going to be there again. I will never hear from her again, because there is nothing to hear.
Since that last bit is almost enough to depress me all over again, I merely want to say thank you to you, my former best friend. Thank you for being indirectly responsible for the worst 19+ months of my life. If you ever decide to come around, be prepared to be ignored.
Oh, yeah
Have a nice day.
