My arm hurts. I can’t seem to sigh the disquiet out of my veins. I found an old folder of text files I never finished working on a dozen years ago, about a rich goth girl and a not rich not goth girl who’s been abandoned by her mom and lives in a big old rambly dilapidating Victorian house. She has a crush on the goth girl. She works for the goth girl’s mom, cleaning house. I’ve missed these girls, on and off, whenever I’ve thought about them over the course of all these years. As a little self-care package, I’m going to go through it and concatenate the files into one “story” or something, and tinker with it, edit it, maybe add to it. We’ll see. These are the found caves in the side of the hill, with bones in them, transient homes, shelters for whatever wild animal needs them. These quiet spaces and in-between times we can give ourselves.

But first, tonight’s pigeon. Hope it’s a good one and not too impossible to wrap my mood around. OK, let’s see...

pigeon

You don’t have to do anything but die.

Thanks, Vee. That’s what I’m gonna call you, here. Hang on, let me add you to my list of fake names I’m using for real people, my pigeon clef — I want to keep track so I don’t end up confusing myself when people start reappearing multiple times.

So my best friend starting in 7th grade, we shall call him Vee.

Yeah, no, I don’t want to do this one. Too tired. Too whiny. Too abject. Whatever, fine, I’ll do it anyway, if only so I can get back to Gwen and Mary, my long lost story girls. But it’s not going to be “good” and it’s not going to be long.

I dragged my ass onto the school bus out in front of the junior high. Was I in 8th grade, or 9th? Not sure. I forget how birthdays and school years work. All I know is, my brother (2.5 years older than me) had to have had his driver’s license by then, because ordinarily he drove us to school, in the black 1979 Malibu Classic that would eventually be mine, all mine! But it doesn’t matter; junior high was both 8th and 9th grade, and then starting in your sophomore year you transferred across the breezeway to the high school, and finished out your indentured servitude over there.

So I flopped down in one of the sweaty seats on the bus, hazy with the smell of rubber and diesel. There was Vee, in the seat next to me. I hadn’t seen him as often lately, because he, having only a younger sister instead of an older sibling that could drive, still rode the bus every day like a plebe.

He kinda had more plebe in his nature anyway, I guess you could say, if you were a total douche and a snob and privileged and all that stuff. Come to think of it, I guess he was probably adopted. No, I think I knew that. I don’t think I’m just figuring that out now. His mom was his bio mom. They were from Mississippi, and, looking back, I’m pretty sure they had known what it was like to be poor. At least more poor than the average income and status of the neighborhood his adoptive father — a veterinarian! — moved them into, next to my mom’s house, and by “next to” I mean across a swooping gully choked with oaks and vines and sumac and sycamore, and a little creek trickling languidly into Little Bear Lake.

That was the summer before 7th grade, I think, when they moved in. My mom said, “A nice family moved in next door. They have a boy your age. Why don’t you go over and — ”

I don’t actually remember what she said. Could it really have been that old fashioned and, like, southern? Probably. Remember, we weren’t slaves to phones back then. We could actually see the world right in front of our eyes. There weren’t layers and layers of digitally filtered phantom meme virus mind veils intercepting and reinterpreting every single thing we saw, heard, felt, thought —

We just — were people, and — saw things, and —

Go ahead, tell me I’m being nostalgic. The past I’m daydreaming about never happened, etc, etc. I know.

But you wanna know a secret? I think maybe the past actually did happen. Anyway, that’s what the hyperinformational meme complexes that sum up to what I think of as my consciousness are telling me at the moment, so we’ll roll with it.

Whatever she said, whether I had parental social support or just strolled over there brazen as you please and knocked on the door my own self, I did go over there, and we did almost instantly become friends, and then we “did stuff” all summer and all through 7th grade and the summer after that — that’s what we called it. Vee pointed this out one time: “We say ‘do you want to come over and do something,’ but we really mean come over and play. We just don’t call it that anymore because we’re too old for that.”

We had guns and swords and bikes and boats and he had a trampoline that we bounced on sometimes but more often just lazed around on, gazing either up at the canopy of oak leaves filtering the wan afternoon sky or else down at the leaf litter and cool damp limestone of the ground, just talking about whatever. Philosophizing. Making up ghosts to believe in.

God damn. I miss that little fucker sometimes.

So I’m thinking this must have been 9th grade, when I clambered onto that stuffy, miserable bus that day, because there’s no way we could have had all the adventures we had, grown so close, overlapped our souls, in just a single year. It had to have been 9th grade when I flopped down in the seat next to him, after not having seen him for a while, and he asked me how come I wasn’t getting a ride home with my brother, how come I was riding the bus like some kind of animal, and I said “I have to, because my brother has an orthodontist appointment.”

And he said, with what should have been, could have been, may have been meant as the ordinary kind of familiar smirk we would always use to refer back to some previously established philosophical tenet, some middle-school transfiguration of epistemology — the smirk that includes, that says I know you get the deeper meaning — he said, “You don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything but die.”

But it was the wrong kind of smirk.

It came across as the sharp kind. The kind that worries its way into the shell of your psyche like an oyster knife, seeking for the pearl of your vulnerability.

I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way. Did he? I could be so sensitive sometimes.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but, looking back, that offhand remark signaled the death of our friendship. A friendship doesn’t have to do anything but die, either. Ours didn’t right then, not immediately, but it faded, we drifted. That next year I started having a social circle, instead of just the one friend at a time I’d always relied on up till then. I started being in plays and cultivating a sort of soft nature-boy aura. He started preferring the Twisted Sister and Mötley Crüe kids. They did drugs, he did drugs, I mean more than my marijuana dabblings. I heard later, at our 10-year high school reunion, that he had been into it pretty bad with coke and maybe some other stuff, but that he was trying to work his way back out of all that. I hope he did.

A few years earlier than that though, after high school but before I moved out of town, I had a summer job delivering pizzas and I rang the bell at a big ugly new house in the new development that had plastered over what used to be me and Vee’s favorite cow pasture to wander around in, and Vee’s dad answered the door. He seemed very alone, very divorced, a little dazed, but pleased to see me. Oddly, I don’t remember talking about Vee very much if at all. I gave him his pizza, he gave me a comically oversized tip, the summer swallowed me back up and that was that and I’ve never seen any of them again.

God damn. I miss that little fucker sometimes.

There’s more to say, but — we’ll get there.

Somewhere, someone has the folder of text files he and I are in. Somewhere in time, someone has found it, opened it up after all these years, and it has made them smile. The smile that includes. The smile the smirk aged into.