Wearing My Smile | ✔

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

I imagined that time when you were sitting down on the lonely dock when we were seventeen, two months before your death, your legs swaying down into the clear water. How childlike you sometimes seemed to be. How when you smiled, the whole world ceased to be. When you looked down into the lake, your little smile was genuine, young and younger still, but then you had to look up and find me.

The emotions in your hazel eyes that day made them infinitely older. I thought to myself, I thought it over and over, what did they do to you? Or the other thought I could not stop from creeping between my hard edges, what did I do to you? I kept on recalling the easier days back when were little, you know? Before things got complicated, Sam, but I remembered the bruises in your pale skin when we used to jump into the lake and I knew right then things had never been simple for you at all—it was a privilege for someone like me.

You stood up from your seat, nodding and motioning me to follow you. You didn't look back because you knew I would. I'd follow you anywhere if you'd let me, but that was exactly the problem, wasn't it? You didn't want me to, and Sam, I got it. The place you'd go wasn't the place you'd want me to follow. I didn't know it then, but I know it now.

"You haven't been to school for four days," I told you. It was a question, hiding cowardly as a statement. For weeks you'd been isolating yourself again. You were gone more often than not, and even though you came home to me, you'd never speak of where you'd been. I recalled the people you chose to spend time with at school or outside of it, how you'd drink in daylight and smoke like nothing mattered.

Something had changed in the last few months, or at least since a couple of weeks after your seventeenth birthday. There was something about your birthdays which seemed to wreck you. I didn't know what it was.

"I haven't." You nodded. An unlit cigarette between your lips. My fingers itched to take it into my mouth.

"Why?"

"I don't see the point of it anymore, I guess. And anyway, I end up fighting more often than not."

"We talked about this," I insisted. "We could make your life better, but we need to graduate first. We'd work for it. I'd help you—"

"Roo, I know." You looked back at me, then away. I should have seen it. I should have known what you meant right there. "And I thank you for that."

But the stupid ignorant fool that I was asked you in bafflement, "I don't understand. It's less than a year away. You're just going to...drop it?"

You pulled out a lighter and lit your cigarette. You were quiet for a long time, but if I learned anything from the days I'd spent with you, Sam, it was how to flow with the silence, and then with the serenity that followed close behind. "I don't know, Roo, I'm not smart like you."

"You know that's bullshit. You're smarter than me."

You smiled at me, but it was a resigned smile, like you had given up. I should have seen that at the time, too, that you had given up more than just school.

"Would you come to school, at least?"

"Oh, Roo...." That voice of yours, the one you used every time I stubbornly fought for something impossible and futile. But you weren't futile for me, Sam. I wondered if you'd ever known.

"For me."

"Okay, for you, but it's not going to change anything. I can't concentrate. I mean, school has never been my thing, music is." A second, then two, before you whispered to yourself. "Was."

I held your left hand, the way I did sometimes when we were trying to comfort each other, and you froze before you held mine back. I said to you, "I love you. You know that, right?"

You didn't say anything. You just kissed my knuckles as we both looked out to the serene lake. I think now perhaps at the time you were wondering if love could fix anything at all, because for years in your life, it hadn't, why would it change now?