Somewhere out there, buried in a forgotten box tucked away inside an abandoned closet already full of things floating on the edge of abandonment, the limnal space between wanting to remember and needing to forget, there is a photo of me in my youth, 18 years old. My arm is wrapped around my first real love, the girl who would become my first true broken heart. The wound I left untended festered for years, its fumes producing a kind of intoxication, an impenetrable Delphic nostalgia against which nothing measured up, whose abyssal sense of loss I treasured much longer than was healthy for me or for the her that existed beyond the mythology I did not want see through. The photo was taken at school, after hours. I had finished with volleyball practice, and she was still in the yearbook room working on a deadline. It was a loopy kind of afternoon merging into early evening, the unusual feeling of being a usually strict place without much supervision or regulation. At some point that evening, somewhere in my things I discovered a tie, the one I wore in my senior pictures, and tied it around my head bandanna style. The absurdity of my bleached blonde hair combed upward, hommage a Kramer, set off by my refashioning of the tie is difficult to describe, and is in some ways inconsequential; it was high school and I didn’t care, or perhaps more accurately, I wanted everyone to know that I didn’t care. Read the rest »
