And thought it was...
Now, this is just a story. How I remember things. But the question I’m asking about stories (true or false) is can they change things. Can this help?
We were friends during Sophomore and Junior years in High School. (Good friends we’d say.) And I did have a crush on her the entire time.
We talked to each other a lot during school (we seemed to have a lot of classes together). A lot through email. And occasionally over the phone. Naturally, since it was me, we didn’t hang out at all outside of school.
(I presume) we trusted one another and told each other things we didn’t tell other people. I felt like Taylor’s secret friend. (For a while my friendship with Taylor was the most important relationship in my life.)
But nothing really ever happened between Taylor and I, good or bad.
At the end of Junior year I stopped having a crush on Taylor, and – with due to her constant absence Senior year and boyfriend Brenden – we stopped talking. There was no fight or conflict... everything just eased off and eventually stopped.
Still, I tell a story (something that happened) where I’m a Freshman in college. I’ve not seen, spoken or thought about Taylor since Alexis’ party (graduation night). I bump into her on campus. We chat for a minute and I give her my email address.
She emails me a couple of times. I don’t respond, or maybe I do. She sends another email and I send her an email saying that I have no interest in being her friend again. That I don’t think we have or had anything in common… That I don’t want to find out if we do… That it’s a past I no longer think is possible... That I don’t care to explore or reinterpret the details and events ( I didn't that day as a college freshman and don't even now as a graduate student).
It wasn’t the nicest thing I’ve ever done, but I didn’t want her to think we were going to have a relationship like the one may or may not have had in High School.
So, there's a story.
Can this help?
We were friends during Sophomore and Junior years in High School. (Good friends we’d say.) And I did have a crush on her the entire time.
We talked to each other a lot during school (we seemed to have a lot of classes together). A lot through email. And occasionally over the phone. Naturally, since it was me, we didn’t hang out at all outside of school.
(I presume) we trusted one another and told each other things we didn’t tell other people. I felt like Taylor’s secret friend. (For a while my friendship with Taylor was the most important relationship in my life.)
But nothing really ever happened between Taylor and I, good or bad.
At the end of Junior year I stopped having a crush on Taylor, and – with due to her constant absence Senior year and boyfriend Brenden – we stopped talking. There was no fight or conflict... everything just eased off and eventually stopped.
Still, I tell a story (something that happened) where I’m a Freshman in college. I’ve not seen, spoken or thought about Taylor since Alexis’ party (graduation night). I bump into her on campus. We chat for a minute and I give her my email address.
She emails me a couple of times. I don’t respond, or maybe I do. She sends another email and I send her an email saying that I have no interest in being her friend again. That I don’t think we have or had anything in common… That I don’t want to find out if we do… That it’s a past I no longer think is possible... That I don’t care to explore or reinterpret the details and events ( I didn't that day as a college freshman and don't even now as a graduate student).
It wasn’t the nicest thing I’ve ever done, but I didn’t want her to think we were going to have a relationship like the one may or may not have had in High School.
So, there's a story.
Can this help?
Labels: Mark
posted by M S Martinez at 2/25/2006 05:49:00 PM
6 Comments:
Y'all.
Yeah, you couched it to her perfectly. You were good not to give her the opportunity to misunderstand.
I spent a year in Kentucky one week.
It was just one week, but it was boring. Like any good American, here, I got something for nothing and I still complain about it. A free trip somewhere I have never been, with no rules, no parents and five good friends of mine. Still we think about it and we talk about it, anyone can say anything about it but all you hear is it was boring, or it sucked, that stuff. Mostly it didn’t go anywhere like an anticlimax doesn’t go anywhere. Where the only events are far away from the competition we came to see.
It’s Saturday and already dark. Collectively we are doing nothing; watching car, boat and other vehicular accidents in slow motion again and again on TV. I am a vegetarian at this point eating French fries and an apple pie as we talk about Kurt Vonnegut books. We talk about the economic state of the 1970’s and the 1930’s and then we talk about girls.
We decide that Logan is the cynical one of the group, Cliff is the nice one who is slightly cynical, Peter is the cynical one of the group, and I am the cynical one of the group. Mike is just racist. Avery is only a jock whose pecks look like boobs. And Billy is sometimes seven. These are the roles we play for the week. Before that curfew we even argue about what it means to be cynical and assign terms, saying you’re a cynical bastard and I’m just a cynical asshole.
It’s six and sometimes seven guys and we talk about nothing because we can’t go anywhere. We walk around town one day and now it’s a weekday. There are no shops and the few still around are closed. There are no movie theaters.
We talk about sex. We talk about philosophy, and we talk about both at once. Evolution and religion. One day Mike and Avery leave, Mike and Avery are the ones that the rest of us know are not as intelligent but we never say so out loud. Conversation bounces around a lot and the four of us left talk about the past. Peter’s been in something like this and he tells us about how you never do as well as you should in the competition. It’s cynical and pessimistic so we tell him he’s an arrogant cynic because of the context of the word “should”. Either way, he says, it always feels like something is unfinished, even when you’re stuck on some campus or in some little town.
Or some boring town.
Dialogue peaks and none of us talk much after this. It’s all that needs to be said right then and there. Here and now.
We talk about the stupid things Mike says that are racist, how he doesn’t realize he is racist but is how he is racist. We laugh about the story Billy tells us about Jack maybe masturbating or something in the bed their shared in the middle of the night. “And I wake up and the bed is, like, shaking.” By the end of the week we are telling the stories like it’s a reunion, our lives separate and removed with only the past in common.
We get on a plane and we go home.
I decide to write a story about it. Now that it’s in the past to where it feels like a different life of mine. The aspiring cynic goes up to Peter and Logan and Mike saying how he wants to write a story about the whole trip, he needs to ask them about Kentucky. Try to figure out what they think it meant, he says, if anything. Him always asking for the meaning in one sentence or less, to be used creatively in a short story; a gimmick. All three say something, but no one is satisfied by what they say. Maybe they will get back to him with something better tomorrow, or whenever they think of it.
After that Logan sends me a three-page e-mail where he tries to sort it out. Talking about what it could have meant to other people, what it should have meant in our lives. Had we won that is, the competition. Mike doesn’t say much, denying his racism. “At least we had a cool group of kids because otherwise it would have been even more pucking (sic) awful”. Peter, Peter doesn’t seem to be able to talk about the trip in the positive or as an answer and not a question. What wasn’t wrong with Kentucky? What didn’t suck? No one can figure out the lesson for this specific week. Me I see us one day at a reunion and we’ll talk about how Jack maybe masturbated on the bed. Not the competition.
Kentucky is an odd memory. Foggy. I try to make up a line too. Instead here are a thousand words where I talk about things other people said and stretch the truth so to make it have some sort of plot. I do one quote I keep around, my rainy day fund. It fits an anticlimactic with no resolution, but it’s still not mine.
The book says, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”
That my friend is plagiarism! You'll never work in this academy again.
Also, you should probably delete those old emails at some point.
I believe the word you were looking for was 'pastiche.' Besides, the author function is overrated - and I believe dead, the last time I checked. Or does Oprah have us all scurrying to defend authorial authenticity?
Regardless, I thought the only way to answer your question was through another story; whether that story was true or false, or even mine to begin with seemed trivial. Especially in light of both texts. And trust me, it was more painful for me to wade through our ungainly correspondence - but I guess that is the historian's burden. *alas* Besides, I was thinking of DECA the other day and I would rather not have that story fade away. Not yet at least.
Have you seen Capote yet?
~~ fearful symmetries ~~
You're right. I'm re-editing that version of the story you posted. I'll put up the new one when it's more polished.
And I haven't seen Capote. Also, I doubt I ever will. But I did watch that Oprah.
I think I already told you this, but you giving the original story (which you should look over again) to Mike Horn is one of my favorite things in the world.
Did we actually take the IB English test in Louisville? All I can really remember is
lager lager lager lager shouting
lager lager lager lager shouting
lager lager lager shouting
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