Well, why deviate now? In keeping with that theme…
Remember this character? Yeah. How could you forget? I only, like, write about her, like, every freakin’ day or somethin’. Anyhow… I’m not sure if this is exactly how it goes, but this is how I remember it. I was flipping through my ’93-’94 Academy yearbook a coupla weeks ago and I came across her page. She wrote to me, “If you wanna sing out, sing out. And if you wanna be free, be free… And if you wanna live high, live high. And if you wanna live low, live low…” and so on and so forth.
Apparently this is a Cat Stevens song. I didn’t know. I was never into Cat Stevens. But yesterday I loaded a bunch of mp3’s from my friend’s computer onto my mp3 player. So today I’m at work, mp3in’ away, and I hear those words. I don’t think I’d ever heard ‘em spoken or sung out loud before, and I immediately recognized those words as Kat’s entry in the yearbook.
I stopped cold in my tracks and had to just stand around for a minute. Heart stops. Oxygen flow to brain on hold. Entire body frozen, tingling. Weird how that happens, huh? I don’t see this girl for years, and then some song that I never heard before just pulls me right back into 1994. I mean, this stuff shouldn’t happen, right? It’s been how freakin’ long? I guess I miss old friends… but enough to stop me cold in my tracks? I thought I was tougher than that.
That said… I’ve grown to love Emo. The Old School emo stuff, like Saves the Day and At the Drive in… stuff like that. Stuff all the emo kids think of as sell-outs and aren’t even really emo in their eyes. But screw them. I’m not hip little emo kid. I’m 26 years old dammit, and I can like what I like.
Anyways, that stuff makes me feel sixteen again. Well, okay, maybe seventeen, when I was with my first sort-of girlfriend ever and I was all full of angst because I got jealous when she told me she wanted to hook up with my lesbian friend, and when she never saw me in a play I was in that ran for a month.
Not to make her sound bad, ‘cuz she wasn’t. She was great. She had blue hair. Blue hair rocks. Anyways, a couple of emo stories about her before I go. (If she knew I was writing about her, she’d probably be mad. But I seem to be pissing people off left and right with my words lately anyway, so who gives a flying crap?) And again, these are the details as I remember them. They may not be completely accurate, but hey. This is how I remember it.
I remember one Christmas break in college… I forget what year it was exactly… we hadn’t seen each other in a few years, and while home, I went to watch movies over at her place on Christmas Eve Eve. (December 23rd.) So we watched, like, three movies, and it was just like the old days. By that point, it was about 2 or 3 in the morning on Christmas Eve, and it was snowing. The first snowfall of the year. We went out and played in it. Then we went to bed.
A few weeks later, she was about to fly back to college. I went to the airport with her, and gave her a little hug as she went off on the runway. A few minutes later she turns back around, comes right back up to me and says something like “Someday I want to do this properly. You and me.”
