Face To Face

The drop-out is faced with chores that the school-goer is pluckingly unblemished by.
Among that throng surrenduring to the steady tow of academia, there is no need to maintain contact with those quasi-friends whom you count among your steady 150Contacts Count on Facebook.  The friends you mention to your mother and are forced to qualify with "oh I told you about her. Didn't I?"  
Students are all perpetual friends of proximity.  At a gap of six to eight months they have little to catch up on, because they've been at school.

But the drop-out is in dangerous waters, successively sinking fast from the calming graces of friends embraces.  Acquaintences faces fade, shuffle into a deck of images.  People shrink into ideas or names, names which only drain from your jittery memory in dreamy overwhelming swarms.  And the legitimate fear screams from every waking moment that though you are thinking of them, they are not thinking of you.

It forces you to remain vigilant in your pursuit of accustomhood.  Purposefully pursue palaver to cultivate trust, intimacy, which left unguarded cowers into insufficient assumptions that understandings remain where there is only a once shared common experience.

This weekend when 
she called me and 
said she would be in town I took a sharp breath 
----and jumped against those suddenly loosened memories, falling in shards all around me. 

Her golden hair offered a glimpse into a harbor of bliss, another world I have no longer been living in.
She looked great, like a statue or a painting, and her endless eyes fired with recognition beyond words when she met me at my new address.

Me, still wearing the masks.  The artist.  The muscian.  The writer.  The bohemian who is supposed to be kind of worn at the corners of his soul.  I really am worn, but that's not due to artistic integrity or years of tortured insights compromised at the hands of others, no it is only the simple sadness of living daily with the knowledge that I could be comforted by her slender soft limbs were it not for my failings.  My  physical appearance is a camoflage, I make myself appear educated although I am not.  But she thinks I am disguised as an artist, none the wiser.

"How are you?"
"You look fabulous!"
"How have you been?"
"Better now, seeing you again."

Jealous man looking on, watching from afar wishing he could hug the pretty girl.  Wishing he were me.  
What does he see?

Two vacant figures betting against time, hoping for the endless day, confiding brief affectations of those old knowing intimacies to win back the merit of closeness.  Concave and convex, our souls once again find their borders and reinstate their old framework.  My shamed regret.  Her step-out into the world grasping for the guiding safe hand of a brief friend renewed.  The gamble paid off.

I am in orbit.  The birdsong beams from trees in an unbeaten review.  Today the sun smiles on me.  We walk and catch up and the world once again spins on its axis sing-song and carefree.

It's only a story because it's happening now.  In three to five years even the school-kids who played by the rules will be forced to come to terms with their own smudged familiarities.  Our lifestyles are mannered around ourselves and we let everyone else pass by the wayside, slide across our eyes in the effervescent pursuit of careers, relationships, possessions; things.  People; anyone who ever lived, so inscrutabley superior and tried by the corrosions of time.
It's only worth mentioning now because I am so young and this should be a non-issue.  But here we are.  Fighting fate walking against wind, hand in hand again on this fateful day.