Reminiscence

Albuquerque is a mirage in a desert. Its streets stretch on endlessly; the celestial vault above it is a bright lake, directly adjourned to the sandy infinity of the earth. There is a particular brightness; and it stifles everything into submissive repose. The eternal sunshine bathes the minds of its dwellers with constant drowsiness; and yet, it is a complacent, reflective drowsiness. It is a world immersed in silence. 1

Those who cannot understand will call it a dead city. Certainly, the solitude of nights, the persistent winds, the absence of valleys or hills, the great dark masses of the nearby mountains, the continuous heat, the short, stumpy cactus plants, the Indians; they are like excerpts from a mundane dream; and yet, this surrealism brings about a strange kind of joy, a new kind of endearment; and it is these places which I learned to fall in love with; these, the settings of all my transcendent voyages, of my most peculiar insomnias. It is here that the story begins to unravel; and like the endless ribbons of its highways, it is a story undefined, unclear, ever-lasting, and the very madness of its drivers. 2

I used to spend my summers with my best friend, sitting in the lofty shade of her garage, thumping notes on the ancient piano, watching skateboards ride up and down the driveway. It was a curious object that piano; the very mark of troubled times put to rest. Its coat of paint, now dark, chipped, and grossly coated in red lipstick (the unlucky victim of childhood amusement), was a sorrowful sight of degradation. It belonged to no one. The previous owner had been a suicide; in the forgetfulness of sorrow, no one had bothered to sell or destroy it. And it now rested, immobile, cast away between boxes of useless contraptions, flowered in a coat of decay. My hands were its only friend, its last interlocutor. 3

It was on this very piano that it began. And on the ordinary afternoons of my youth, as I was strumming discordant notes, bored, clasped by the inescapable silence of Albuquerque. My best friend, herself in the throngs of boredom, had invited one of her own close friends. I had never met her, and indeed, I was uneasy at the sight of strangers. I have always been a sensible, erratic being; the sight of new people bothered my contemplative nature, and I often felt claustrophobic at the sight of new eyes. 4

I cannot say that her appearance at all reassured me. She was madness; this, my first impression. She would talk slowly, cautiously, the suddenly burst out in strange sounds, only to cut off her wild escape with subtle laughter. She twirled a knife around her fingers, and struck out randomly at the innocent recliner she had chosen as her momentary cove. But she spoke with kindness. There was a certain childlike innocence in her words, in her dimpled smile, in the curious alignment of her features; by the stories, she was no innocent creature. And yet, the air of impervious spontaneity, the composed gaiety, the outbursts; she was like a child exploring the vastness of an ocean. 5

My first thought was a cautious smile. I have always disliked people; they are books full of uselessness, and it has always been a struggle to keep my thoughts with theirs, for I was always wondrous dreamer, a philosopher. But she; somehow, in her company I did not feel distant. I did not feel, like upon gazing in every other face of distraction, that I was in a glass case; I no longer felt like a monster, like a disturbance; and my gnawing egoism was for once curious wonder. I was free with her, for she was as strange as I, and so much more enchanting. 6

Our friendship was a quirky entanglement of erratic conversations. It is a story, alas, with many stories. 7

Intoxication in the bright sun turns everything into a continuous play of voluptuous masses, of shadows, of black and white flashes and colored miasmas. I remember her best through the scent of marijuana, and thus, it is hard to distinguish her true form from the distortion of my altered perception and heightened emotional fluctuations. 8

Our smoking took place at the mall, whose overfilled halls and crowded food courts we ruthlessly pursued every Saturday. It was a pointless ritual, and one which I both despised and cherished; every new coming would inevitably spark remnants of the last uneventful stroll, and bring up memories of disgust. One would end up wondering what had directed him to this monotonous dimension, and participate in the general complaining. And yet, to miss it filled my spirit with a strange melancholy; and now, after all this time, it has become indelible and strong; it still captivates my soul with longing. 9

We were sitting at a table, immobile island between the confused meandering of words and footsteps. She and I, with pupils dilated and hearts racing from chemical induced alertness. The fluorescent light was much too strong; I could almost feel its buzzing intensity, its inexorable scrutiny breathing on the back of my neck. Her stare was immobile, hypnotizing; we had been gazing into each other’s darkness for countless minutes. The chatting in the background faded to a surrealistic opium, muffled and suddenly strong, varying with the level of my schizophrenic consciousness. 10

I could hear the persistent humming of the ventilating system, and it suddenly drowned out everything else, becoming maddeningly strong. 11

“Do you hear that?” My words were vacillating, slurred; they seemed to break our silence like a sudden sword.12

“The humming…”13

Her eyes continued to gaze into mine.14

“This humming, so loud…it hurts my ears…it is like the wailing of crickets in summer.”15

We were once more submerged in silence.16

“Isn’t it a pleasant noise, that of the crickets?”17

“But the crickets bring back the memories of summers in Italy. They were together with the heat pressing down on my body, the sticky residue of sweat in the morning…the mosquitoes. I hated those nights…the nights without air…” 18

I spoke these words softly, transfixed, and through my eyes I let the images drift into hers, and they seemed to ease silently through the currents of her memories, speaking to her emotions, connecting with mine. That day, we were infinite. We were glued to one another, and what was mine was naturally hers; there was but one silent focus, one mind, a single emotion, for there ceased to be separation. She was then a goddess, and I, a grain of gold in her hair.19

And it no longer mattered that I was a girl, and she was a girl; indeed, I was not a girl, for there were no sexes. We were boundless, and I was in love. 20

I remember a time we were together in a colored room; the walls were random triangular blotches of color, and we were sitting face to face, completely in the throngs of intoxication. Suddenly, the wall was no longer filled with random colors; suddenly, there were houses, and trees, smiling faces and flowers blowing in winds; I shaped out a bear, she found a comet; there were curious stares moving our way, but I noticed nothing. Indeed, I saw nothing but the colored frenzy, for I was captivated by that jocund game, and she fit like another mellifluous color in the swell of my childish excitement. 21

These are my memories of her. Bursts, confusion, pointless games; in truth, I suppose it gives her justice, for this was the composition of her soul.22

I remember once, sitting on the grass of a park. The only gray afternoon I remember from that desert; a slight drizzle had cast our hair into tangles, and the wind prickled our faces into pale roses. We exchanged universes. She told me of loneliness; for she was a troubled creature, in all her wild liveliness. I have never seen corrosion burn so bright; for of all the days of my journey, I have never seen such great sadness, such profound confusion, such repression; spoken with fragmented words and vacuous sighs. I felt my heart grow beyond proportion, and crumple under the weight of her helplessness, beating through her sensations.23

I cried. We embraced for hours. We were just breaths of wind on the currents, alone, and in our loneliness, together. Somehow, miraculously, the boundary between souls cracked and gave way. For once, if only for brief seconds, our physical bodies were not in the way. Words, these meaningless, harrowing phantoms, suddenly gave way to telepathy, and I could not help but smile, I could not help but laugh, and she with me! 24

It sounds like a silly story of raving animals; but what story of love is not?25

In the darkness, when I beheld the silver shadows of the moon, I thought of her. When I met the sky in the morning, I thought of her. Between my mother’s tales of Sicilian childhood, between the aromas of morning coffee, I thought of her. In the eves, when fire crackled in our living room, I thought of her. And somehow, her scent seemed to envelop my every breath of air, and I was never tired of visiting her face in my dreams. 26

When we talked, our spirits melted, sizzling and bubbling like spring afternoons, and I wished there were no hours, and no sunsets; that there were no days, and no boundaries of space, and that she could always simply be; beside me, inside me. 27

Time, however, is not a complacent friend. And my father’s restlessness brought my Albuquerque summers to an end. We moved away in December; two years after I had first met her gaze. 28

I remember the last of her face; it was so bright, and the light shone prisms on her raven ringlets, complimenting her dark, brooding eyes. I could not bring myself to say a word; what words could you say, when your souls are entangled, dependent on one another’s? It was a silent parting, and one in which no words had ever needed to be spoken.29

Living without her was hell. I had suddenly grown in years; in the place of my teenage animosity, I beheld a gray, tired woman, beaten by old age; the mirror never ceased to mock the dark pools under my eyes, the sightless expression of my features. To say I was consumed by sorrow would be inaccurate; for the destruction of my psyche left no understanding of sorrow. I was thrust into a melancholic apathy, a slugged nothingness; colors were dulled, and my voracity for life became continuous nausea. I did not cry, I did not laugh. Everything was senseless. She visited me in my dreams; every night was a fragment of her touch, a recall of her cherubic lips; a longing, an irresistible longing. 30

I missed her. I still miss her. Every time I see a new face, I search for her gaze; but, alas, emptiness always greats me coldly with a stranger. 31

After all this time, the sight of her face, grown blurred and indistinct with time, still greets me in the mornings. After all this time, I still catch whiffs of her childlike laughter somersaulting through the winds. After all this time, I still wish, I still dream. After all this time, I am still in love; as in love as I was in our hours of perdition, among curling smoke and senseless distortions. 32

And what love is itself not the greatest of intoxications?33