Surf Song | |
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I'm standing here looking at one of those surf videos shown on the television screen in front of me, someone's turned off the volume to the tube and instead is playing some love songs in a Hawaiian style remake. Theres this sweet short barrel breaking, and a longboarder is going toes on da nose all the way down the wave as the camera pans along with him. You can see his boardshorts shining and the water looks so inviting and familiar. It isn't the music, the booze, or the video that is making me homesick, it isn't any of that that makes me wonder about more. It's the sickening combination of circumstance, mood, recollection and situation that brings to mind some of the more painful memories that aren't supposed to come up. Its all of the crap that you've stuffed deep inside of you and have forgotten, emotions and issues that you've decided to put aside for later. And the words somehow make it into my altered mind-set, a big bloodied chisel pounding my heart loud and clear, something of a forgotten voice singing to me.
I'm thinking back to a time when we were both trashed out of our minds, a time where out of anger, out of frustration, I professed my true love and hate for her, blatant, in her face, honest, and tactlessly. We spent hours yelling at each other, crying, I honestly don't remember everything that happened that night. All I know was that after that I had come clean to her, for the first time she had known exactly what she meant to me, exactly how I felt, and in the morning, she was still there. I came to the maritime city unexpected, unattached. It seemed odd at first, sleepy towne of cloudy skies, a seasonal depressive's final resting place. And I wonder about her......what she was feeling when she came here to this city? Did she walk the look at the cherry blossoms as the wind catches them across the pink architecture of the quad? Catch the bus to the waterfront and gaze at the ocean longing for home? I think about the local girl, fish out of water missing her family and home, did she wander around the student union, between classes wondering what the hell she was doing here so far away? Did she go to big drunken college parties realizing that there must be more to life then an abrasive alcohol haze that lasts till morning and ends with a sick feeling? I had spent the day walking around the campus, looking at the buildings, as a student of another side of academia. I wandered around taking in the experiences of another person, another time, another life. Between sitting in on a psych class I had sat in the square, looking at the concrete bricks on the ground, and the hundreds of people bustling by to their next class. I wondered what it was that had made her so unhappy here, what it was that made her to go back home. I think about her now confused and dismayed, I think of all the words said, hurt and pain, and how in simplicity what it was that I cherished about her. Sometimes I think the most painful thing of getting over her was realizing that I had lost, regardless of the speculation of physical superficiality, mistrust, or youthful incursions, someone truly special. I do know now just as I have always known, just forced myself to forget, that she was everything I could've asked for in a friend. Watching as the song comes to a close, almost in perfect sync with the breaking of the waves and the longboarder, I feel like in some way after all this time choking under feelings of abandonment and solitude, that perhaps it was instead I who may have failed her, left her when she might have needed me the most. |