youth

00 \\ memories

"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once." - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

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When couples recollect their first meeting I always think that they’re lying. I mean, not that they're making it up but that they don’t actually remember their very first meeting and they’re just telling us the one they have come to remember as their first meeting. Take my friends James and Dana – I know for a fact the first time they met was at my fifteenth birthday party when Kyle stole some of his dad’s beer and nearly everyone got wasted and then grounded. James had thrown up on Dana’s best friend’s shoes and Dana had slapped him because her best friend happened to be passed out so she had to do it for her. But when they’re asked how they met they always tell the story of how James helped Dana to pick up her books when she dropped them one day after Chemistry. Probably because Dana passed out too, soon after James threw up on her best friend’s shoes, and James was too drunk to be even aware that he had thrown up. The only reason I remember is because I didn’t get drunk. I pretended to be drunk – well in truth I just imitated my friends in their stumbling and turned up the level of idiot I was used to portraying –and when I woke up the next morning I could remember everything. Obviously though they couldn’t. And, well, to be honest a lot of the time you don’t realize you’ve met the person you’re going to fall in love with and therefore you don’t store the meeting in your memory. You just let it fade until a memory that had actual impact becomes the first meeting memory.

But I’m getting away from the point. What I’m trying to say is that our first meeting probably wasn’t our first meeting. I’m pretty sure I didn’t throw up on your best friend’s shoes but I’m also sure we must have met each other before. After all, we went to the same school as each other for over four years. That has to come down to at least one meeting, even if it was a brief one. What I remember as our first meeting is the record store. The one down on 44th that’s been open for about two hundred years and is your favorite place on planet earth. Well, fourth favorite place actually – behind your bed, the book store down on 28th and the shed your dad renovated for you on your seventeenth birthday. And I remember you. I remember how you had that slight frown on your face that always appears when you’re having a “first world dilemma”. I remember that you were holding two record sleeves and standing by the record player that was currently playing the vinyl of Bennie and the Jets. I don’t remember if you were wearing black or red shoes. Or if your top was a Beatles tour top or a Led Zeppelin tour top. But I do remember that I was watching you and that I sneezed and you said “bless you” without even looking up. Now I know that you do it every time, without fail, when someone sneezes and that it actually lost you a grade when you said it in an external exam. I also remember that I saw what sleeves you were looking at and that, when you noticed me looking, you lifted the needle off the record and replaced the vinyl back in its sleeve. So maybe most first meetings consist of actual words but I also know that you looked too perspicacious. And as soon as you had put the vinyl away you completely melted back into your own world. I doubt I could have broken in, even if I had wanted to.

As far as it goes it was a trashy first meeting. Sometimes I think I’d like it if I could recall our second meeting as our first meeting, like you do. You always deny not having noticed me in the record store and sometimes I think you’re telling the truth and that I really didn’t enter your world but other times I think you’re lying just so you can have a one-up on me. Truth is I don’t know though and I’m actually just glad that you can remember our second meeting. Even if you say it was our first.

It was Christmas and the streets were empty. Almost. I was there and, as I would find out in about three minutes, so were you. I’d been sent out to see if I could find the limited edition watch my Uncle claimed to have dropped on the way over to the huge family dinner that we had without fail, every year at my grandma’s place. Apparently he had lost it somewhere between the train station and her house – which was a twenty minute walk – but I don’t mind that in actual fact he had left it at home and the trip was a wasted errand because I met you for the first/second time on it. And that means it wasn’t completely wasted. You were outside because you don’t like Christmas but you do like the fact that, on Christmas Day, the world disappears inside their homes. Which means you always get to enjoy being alone in the city that never sleeps. On the Christmas Days that my Uncle doesn’t supposedly lose his watch that is. When I saw you – for the first/second time – you were sitting in the snow on 28th street, outside a book store that had a distinct ‘closed’ sign in the shuttered window. At first I didn’t realize you were the girl I had(n’t) seen in the record store but when you looked up at me I recognized your eyes; there was a whole other world beyond them. I know now that you created it because the real world wasn’t enough for you. I just hope I was there sometimes too; I just hope I was enough for you.