It was a Tuesday of my junior year, when I first realized who my best friend really was. Driving in your mom’s maroon minivan and after all those Elton John songs, your stomach still hasn’t settled. I can see you, sixteen years old, walking down the crowded aisles of musty Chicago airports; lost in a world you shouldn’t be in, but dream someday to live.
Some malevolent, yet perky flight attendant approaches you and she’s all smiles. “Hi, thank you for flying with us today; I am going to escort you on to the plane and to your seat. Please place this pin on the corner of your right shoulder.”
You shudder with embarrassment as you read over the neon pink circular pin, angry at the fact neither of her parents were there. You’re sixteen years old, living in your father’s drunken past and you’re disgusted at the fact you have to face this trip alone. There’s always going to be parental counseling until the day you turn eighteen; two more years until you’re no longer under your father’s deceptive control. A father who can never bite his lip because he never knew anything about his own daughter, just assumptions of what he used to be. Too caught up in his own world, full of selfishness and I hate him for making you feel rejected. I hate him for making you feel less than a person and never loving you. A soft spoken mother full of life, who loves breathing admirations on going out in changing the world, in changing yourself. She’ll build you up one minute and then on those car rides home from my house, a family can be torn. Two different people unraveled to form such a beautiful catastrophe. I search for you behind your crystal blue eyes; they’ve never shown of such an ocean scene.
A younger man sits down next to you and your palms begin to sweat as you try to hide that hideous pin. Your heart races frantically as reality starts to hit you and all you have to hold onto with your plastic hippy rings and drawn on wrists is that one last moment we saw each other. The moment in which we stayed in your room for hours, watching countless amounts of Veronica Mars re-runs and American Beauty. I wrote you letters of hope for your cruel journey and CD’s to consume your scattered mind when you didn’t want to think. The smell of incense still lingers in your room and the clutter on your dressers will never be cleaned. A photograph of the past flutter from one end of the room to the other, you and me of the past summer brings a smile to my face. The symphonies of Guster and Joss Stone harmonize into relaxation as it swims through the vents of your mother’s house; the soundtrack of your life. You talk with such confidence and the mysteries of finding yourself when you leave for Idaho in this quiet room. Hands too shaky and eyes too blurry to comprehend what was said on my letter of hope, unsure as to read while I was there. I’m not convinced when you whimper in the night and those tears hit the pillow like bullets. I know you hold fear, sometimes you’re too easy to read.
You write me e-mails and I start to feel change in your voice, change in the way you eat, or wake up each morning, or the way you style your hair. Your writings have expressed so much feeling since you left the bitterness of Ohio, and your faith in God is no longer there; it’s been placed in something much more compelling. The powers of Buddhism and tarot cards rave inside that lonely cream colored room; you’re locked away finding peace in meditations and happiness in those long bike rides to Wal-Mart. You’re finding happiness in the love you’ve never captured at home from conservative Christians and motivation in endless amounts of photographs in that red pick-up truck you cruise in everyday. Do you think of me when the windows are rolled down and country songs blare through those speakers?
Your heart is broken, lying on your sleeve. Broken by your father who sent you to Idaho only to prove his belief that his teenage daughter had only followed his footsteps. But you somehow pick up where you left off, proving him wrong, even if you drove through hell to get there. You savor restless romantics and the last minutes of night before you fall fast asleep. There’s reassurance in your writing when spurts of the beat generation from Jack Kerouac and Herman Hesse form an escape on the grassy lawns of Idaho. I am consumed by their words of wisdom, as they inspire me to open up and form my own life’s path. In the end you’ve only proven to yourself, you did not shatter into a million little pieces in that warm Idaho home, you can stand on your own with the art that creates a masterpiece of your life. You learned to not give into society, to only conform to your own being. My advice to you is, if no one accepts the person you are, they should never have the privilege in getting to know your passions, your dreams, your motivations or the way you fall asleep at night.
