On the Bus Someday

Of  that string of memories about our lost friendship I remember being invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and after one party, our self-parody of our own stammering speechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish god auto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuits from Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our sameness and differences; our dual waitressing shifts across town, and the long phone calls that followed with their emphatic reiteration of every stingy six-top ordering candy-flavored alcoholic drinks; the after-work visit where we brayed, stomped, then blinked stupidly (while the needle hit the LP’s end) at the empty fifth of gin left on the coffee table, prompting a dim:Uh oh; your imitation of your mother’s habitual and by-the-way inexplicable confession about you to shoe salesmen: She has a funny foot; the apartments, the Olivettis, the boyfriends, all the thoughts exchanged unedited like an experiment of the big, walk-in consciousness, which we might have assumed the verbal equivalent of sex for friends, and whatever closeness meant, we wanted as much as we could have, it was our post-graduate work in The Humanities. Even now, I can’t resist striking up a conversation while standing on line, any line, or introducing myself enthusiastically to whomever I am introduced, but the truth is I am not looking for new friends at this point; I am trying to locate the lost ones, the ones who left through the hole of an argument decades ago, a time more panicked and carefree than any other, except maybe the early years of motherhood, which I missed sharing with you on playground benches. But surely I will see you on the bus someday, and your greeting will package our jokes, advice, tears, book talk, our years of reliance. And so I will expect you will tell me how much I have misunderstood and wrongly assumed in these descriptions, because I never expect those people who have mattered to remain completely gone, even through death, or rebuke. And of course I have to remember what parted us, that I found faults with your other friends, that I spoke as critically and crassly about them as I did about my own person, and to this day I have to be careful of that trait, my junkyard dog of expression, safe only with me on a too-long leash. Here, again, telling you everything with no reason but for memory’s insistence that I string an apology from what I see.