"how much will a day sustain before it grows dim
and frail, weary from all the time we compress?"
best friends. i didn't realize i had one until she died. i also didn't
realize that she was my worst enemy. that summer, the summer after our senior
year, we decided to leave. take off. leave everything behind and be free.
but first, let me introduce us. i was the sarcastic one. i said random
facts, just for fun -- and to try to outsmart her. i spent a lot of my life
trying to outsmart her....shannon....smart, pompous, lesbian. she knew she
was better than everyone else, and she also made sure that they knew she was
above them. we made a good team. we made a horrible team. but we worked.
we were on the road. the 10,000 maniacs song "hey jack kerouac" was playing
on a tape in my old blue volvo. blue...bright blue....blue interior, too,
but darker. just like us. bright on the outside, dark on the inside. i was
wearing a sky blue shirt with a rainbow across the chest. my nails were
painted the color of the ocean. i had on the same pair of jeans i had worn
nearly every day for four years. the blue was faded....
we decided to drive to mexico. we had no purpose....we were just driving.
shannon pulled out that damn book she read at least 43 times that summer.
she was always quoting lines from it. not to say it wasn't interesting, but
after hearing her rant and rave about the same paragraph 23 times in one
hour, it got old. it was amazing, though. every time she read those lines,
her blue eyes sparkled. she tried to be so deep when explaining things to
me. deeper than the deepest ocean. my sarcasm towards her deepness could
stretch as far as the blue, blue sky.
i always wanted her blue eyes. i watched them follow the lady in the rainbow
colored socks and hat. i saw them flicker with amazement at the prostitutes
on the streets of mexico, wearing their flourescent blue garb and their gobs
of blue eye makeup. i saw the blue in her eyes deepen when i said a random
fact. "you know, you're more likely to be killed by a donkey than die in an
airplane accident." i knew how much it annoyed her when i said those things.
thats why i said them. i watched her eyes dance as she hummed "who's afraid
of virginia woolf?" -- a book we had both read and had many arguments over.
i saw her blue eyes laugh when she saw the little black kids -- so black they
were almost blue -- with their hair tied up in tight little pigtails. one of
them had blue eyes. she wanted to stop and talk to him, but we couldn't. we
were on the road. we left mexico and headed towards vegas. the sky was the
bluest blue we had ever seen.
in a little town right outside of texas, gloria gaynor's song "i will
survive" came on. i noticed shannon draw back, but i didn't think anything
of it. that day i was wearing a dark, dark blue sweater. shannon was
wearing red. her eyes were almost grey. she was reading her book again.
that day, though, she said a quote i had never noticed her saying before. i
also noticed that the once light blue cover of that book had turned dark. it
all seemed like i was trying to read too far into something, so i forgot
about it.
we stopped at some weird restaurant called the blue dragon. i ordered
broccoli and a grilled cheese sandwich. shannon ordered some fava beans and
a lamb chop. we debated cannibalism. we finished our meals and i went to
the restroom. the restroom was lit up with blue neon lights and the tiles
were dark bue. the toilets had that blue water cleaning tablet in them. i
washed my hands.
we were on the road again. billie holliday was playing in my old bright blue
volvo. shannon and i decided it was time for a change. we bought a new car.
a midnight blue, 1976 el camino. we made sure it had a tape player so we
could continue listening to that same tape over and over again. when i put
the tape in, the smith's song "sing me to sleep" came on. only now do i
realize how ominous that song was.
right outside of vegas, wearing blue jeans and a blue and red striped shirt,
we saw allison, painting a hotel blue, with a red door. after we left
allison, i spotted two homosexual homeless men on the street. i gave them my
leftover food and a couple of bucks. shannon stayed in the car. she was
reading her book, as usual. when i got back to the car, the sky turned as
dark as shannon's eyes had become. it started raining. we stopped off in
some cheap looking motel. it was painted red and had a red door. the lady
inside looked like death. i brought in a change of clothes, shannon brought
only her book. there was a boy, age 4, with a laugh like mozart's, sitting
in the corner. he had on a bright red sweater and red shoes.
when we got to the room, mozart's first concerto was playing. this is when
shannon started another quote -- another one i hadn't heard. then she told
me of her plans. i didn't have a chance to talk her out of it. she did it
right in front of me. i watched her slice her blue veins, and then i watched
the red, red blood flow out. i called the ambulance. i wathed the red and
blue lights swing back and forth, eventually melting together. as i was
walking out the door, my ocean blue fingernail broke, and a little red
appeared. as i followed behind that ambulance in my el camino, the beatles' song "let it be" was playing on my old tape...
she died three hours later.
at her funeral, which she said she didn't want, i didn't wear blue. that was
the first time that summer that i hadn't worn blue. i wore red. i was the
last to leave....before the caretakers covered her grave, i threw in her
lucky pack of smokes and that blue shirt of mine, with the rainbow, that she
loved so much. i also threw in that stupid book of hers that she had read so
many times that summer. then i walked away, got into that old el camino, and
drove to the nearest used car lot. i traded that el camino in for a red VW.
after she died, i continued my journey on the road. that summer i listened
to my silly tape at least 73 times. with her gone, a lot of my seemed to die
with her. i was still the same sarcastic bitch, but it was different now. i
had nobody to be sarcastic with -- nobody to have wit wars with. i pulled
into the driveway of the house i grew up in. the new inhabitants had painted
over that old blue coat....
"bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness --
everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged
and ecstatic joy of pure being"
-jack kerouac,
on the road
--october twenty-seventh, nineteen-hundred ninety-seven
one twenty-three post meridium