(Phaysis)

(written on Wednesday, 11/23/2005 10:33:39 PM)

Whirlwind. Past 24 hours. Past week. It’s Thanksgiving holiday, my first trip home since Easter, and I’ve been going and going. Since my convalescence this past weekend, I’ve been running on some kind of edge. I’ve noticed it. Alertness. Awakeness, even in the lack of sleep. It’s all the preparations for the trip. The getting the car ready, the packing, the attention to making things happen. In the course of 2 days I hacked up a script to log what it reads from a borrowed GPS receiver. The logs from my drives are beautiful. Pages of useful data of just me…driving to Texarkana last night and, today, Ouachita.

Yeah, I went. Since I was in the neighborhood, loosely speaking, I took the hour-long trip up to Arkadelphia to see my alma mater. This December will mark my ten years since I was a student there; December 14, 1995 was my last day of enrollment. And though I’ve been back to OBU two or three times since in 1996 and 1999, this time around had an extra impact, a certain amount of poignance. It’s weird. It’s good to see the places I still sometimes happily, sometimes ashamedly, sometimes frightfully dream about and remember. And it’s creepy to see the changes, to see which buildings are torn down, which are brand new, and which are still around in all their mid-90′s glory. I’ve been away from OBU for long enough that the act of looking at the campus inspired few heavy emotional responses, and the memories that arrived on first trigger were cold, matter-of-fact memories; place names, hidden areas, geographic layout, things no longer there. But the fallout, the memories that return to me after I saw those places, those memories are at once both warm like fire and cold like an Arkadelphia winter, and they’ve sparked tonight’s firestorm of emotions.

It’s a mouthful, and I’m still trying to ruminate and digest today’s trip.

I shot around 2 1/2 rolls of film, just buildings, spaces, surroundings. No people. The fact that the campus was quiet, that school was out the day before the holiday (I had thought they’d be open), made things empty and solitary, but after my 4 summers spent on campus, the experience of the silent emptiness there wasn’t so alien to me. I did drive up there hoping to visit with old staff and faculty still there and to do some business with my school records, which didn’t happen, but just the experience of being back was enough to justify everything.

In some sense it was the Ouachita that I remembered, and in another sense it was like I was a floating intruder surveying a foreign place, an interloper in a forbidden zone checking up on its changed, hidden secrets. If there had been students there today, if there had been faculty and staff, it would have felt like being a welcomed stranger, like how I feel when I’m walking around Renfest on a late Sunday afternoon near sunset: everything is quieting down, everyone is folding up, the parking lot is decompressing, and I’m walking around between the booths where my few Rennie friends do their business. Yeah, just like that.

But today everything was just empty. The only human noise was from the construction crews, the few stragglers walking around campus, the campus security truck tooling around, and the ever-present Arkadelphia autumn breeze knocking around the leaves. I took the occasion to walk down the hillside beneath the student center to the Ouachita River, to the river bottoms where I spent so much of my time. They’d done some work there, made a walking trail, built steps and platforms down the hillside, thinned out a lot of the trees to open up the space to the campus uphill. The pavillion is still there, and so is the picnic table where my first girlfriend and I ground into each other in the heat of early summer. The odor, the smell down there on the river bottoms, the damp soil, the volumes of still water, the smell of river rot…that smell became my friend, my elixir, my aphrodisiac. I smell it and I am at peace. And today I took it in by the lungfulls. It’s still in my soul. THAT is the Ouachita that I miss.

The people I knew there were good people; not to gloss over everything with a rose-colored sheen, but they were my friends. They were the fire that kept me warm, the spark that burned new experiences into my memories. They were there with me…ten years ago. Not today. I think that was part of what is so surreal about today’s visit, and so saddening and angering. We’ve moved on, they’ve moved on; there were no familiar faces there today to share in today’s experience. I think that’s the hardest part.

It’s heavy, these floods, these torrents of memories and emotions that’re filling my head right now. Just looking around and seeing everything has brought them forward after so many years of not being triggered. There are the big picture memories that’ve always been there, but today brought back the tiny memories, the things that’ve been taken for granted, the decorations on someone’s house on the edge of campus, the fact that the ground near the theater is covered not with grass but with clover, the angled plaques mounted on a courtyard…those memories have come back.

The side trip to Lake DeGray, where I loved going, didn’t help much with the flooding. Went to the Highway 7 beach because it was the closest of the places I used to haunt, and it had the expected late-November empty beach hauntedness. The breeze was a wind over the lake, chopping up little waves in my direction as I stood on the point looking over the lake at the waning sunset. The parking lot was empty. The water was low. And everything had a heavy, heavy poetic air. This is the sunset. I cannot go back. No more dawns. The music playing on my laptop’s jukebox affirmed it, hammered it home:

“The paths that I once tred
Have all but gone
Only embers now smoulder
Where bridges once burned
I feel alive and yet I fear
What may happen now
I know,
I can’t return
…
Can I start again?
Erase this pain
By casting doubts into the waters
Asking judgment of the sea
Though Fortune may guide the fools
I have no wish to be free
Until I am gone.”

-VNV Nation “Distant (Rubicon II)”

In the past week I’ve been ill, I’ve been hyper, I’ve been clicking through the to-do list, I’ve been awake. I even finally and officially met this girl I’ve been exchanging glances with at Mojo’s for the past 3 months. And I’ve been driving, enjoyably and alertly driving. Sightseeing. And now I’m feeling, feeling things I can’t explain without metaphors; I know the words, but I can’t put them together, can’t craft what is necessary to communicate these things. That is my state. I’m still digesting.

Some weeks ago I was asking for some kind of sea change in my outlook, looking for some kind of change in my life, something to make life less stale, more inspired.

I got what I was asking.

Last week I got curious and spent a few evenings looking through the boxes of photographs I’ve taken, all of them from 1993 to the present. This encompasses several eras of my life, from the latter half of my time at OBU to my first post-college residence in Texarkana, to my time in Greensboro, to my time back in Texarkana, and then the 5 years here in Austin, so reviewing these pictures was a flood of memories. The exercise gave me a more level perspective on my current life and I drew renewed ideas as I looked at those pictures. The people, the places, the memories. The ex girlfriends.

I found the pictures of a girl whom I consider the best girlfriend I’ve ever had, the girl from North Carolina. Our relationship in ’97 was incredibly brief and bright, interrupted by my sudden but necessary move back home. Things were starting to warm up between us and then *foop* it was cut short. We kept in touch in the early part of ’98, and she spent her spring break in Texarkana visiting me for a wonderful week before she returned to North Carolina. Some bad stuff went down in her life shortly thereafter and during the following summer we lost touch.

A few months after I moved here in 2000, I was in my bedroom cleaning out my wallet of all the crap that had accumulated. Pulled cards out, slips of paper, receipts. I found her old number and froze. All I had to do was call, but the uncertainty and trepidation took over and I put the number to the side. I drummed up the courage some weeks later and called only to find that the number was dead. So I made the determination to find her; but each time I searched online and found fresh leads, I felt creepy about digging for an old flame and put the information to the side, to never act on it. And I’ve been doing that dance for 5 years.

Well, the pictures I found of her Wednesday night enboldened me. Enough. Enough of the waffling, of the creepiness, of the uncertainty. If she is with someone else, then I will know. If she is still alive, then I will know. If she still thinks of me, then I will know. So I did a new search for her, combined it with the old searches and followed those leads. I sent out emails to people who had websites that referenced her asking if they knew her and could do the contact info forwarding thing. Done. That was easy enough.

Friday morning I awoke to an email from her in my inbox. Elated, I wrote her back before I left for work and after work called the number she provided me. We talked for an hour and it was good. Gave truncated, annotated histories; tried to compress 7 years of the past into a phonecall. She’s had a rough rollercoaster ride since ’98, the troughs and peaks fiercely overshadowing my own thrillride. But there’s still so much more to catch up on, much more to explore. We’re back in touch, and it is good that we’re talking again.

So. These new developments have me rethinking my own lifestyle, about my future, about my state in life. Without going into much detail, I’m looking for a renewal in my income, in my goals, in my motivations. I’m at a heavy time and I have heavy concerns now. It’s time to put the unnecessary parts of trepidation aside and take some responsibility instead of floating along on hopes and comfort zones. I’m taking the little steps to examine the way I think, the thought processes, the emotions, trying to understand them and, finally, to control them for my own betterment, like a watered-down method of zen buddhist meditation. If I can help myself in any way to take things into my own hands, I won’t find myself irrelevant at 40 and hungry at 58.

And so there it is. There is my sea change. These are heavy, pregnant times.

I realized yesterday that last week on July 27th (or somewhere thereabouts), my life in Austin is four years old. I wish I would’ve thought to look into it on the day of the anniversary instead of yesterday. But the fact that I remembered counts for something, yeah?

Wow. Four years. This is getting close to challenging my record time living in a town that’s not Texarkana. I spent 5 1/2 years in Arkadelphia, Arkansas during my time in school. Contrast this with the eight straight years living in Texarkana from the summer after 3rd grade to the summer after my senior year in 1990. My time in North Carolina, though it burned brightly, angrily, quietly and blessedly, was a mere 15 months. A small portion of my time in Austin. And to this day, I still draw parallels between my time in Greensboro, NC, and my time here. I still take lessons from that first post-college foray into big-life. I still tell stories.

So, yeah, it’s been a long trip, and I’m still on it. Austin. I’m at a fragile spot wherein I’m having to balance the fact that Texarkana is my home town, and thanks to my family and few remaining friends, I still hold some odd sort of allegiance to the place, and the fact that Austin is my home. I live here. This is my home. For good or ill, it’s my home.

I think every time I visit Texarkana, I come away with a small piece of knowledge that I could never live there again. The town has potential, yes, sure, it’s growing, of course, but I could never live there again. It’s too small. For me, it is too small. The people there are too small. The vast swaths of empty and decaying brick architecture versus the burgeoning masses of steel-beam and siding buildings. The sign companies that use the same 10 fonts. The lack of good bars. The plethora of shit-kicking “cowboys”. I just don’t fit there. Once I left that town to go to college, I no longer fit. I saw too much of the world at large, met too many varied people. It’s too small. Too simple.

And no visit was as illuminating of this fact more than the last time I went for a few days around July 4th. I spent only three days, but on that monday morning I was itching to return to Austin. That weekend, man. I don’t want to offend my friends who still live there, nor my family, but it’s just, bleh. Things are going wrong. It’s not visible to those who see the changes as they happen; it’s only when you look after a span of time, you see the changes, the railroading, the herding. As I drove around, I saw more instances where the people of Texarkana are being offered a seemingly larger but actually smaller number of choices on where to eat, where to shop, where to bank, where to worship, and so on. It’s just, I dunno, wrong.

If I left Austin and came back after some time, sure I’d see changes. The thing is that I see the changes — and I haven’t left. Acknowledgably, things are not at all what they had potential to be back in 2000 when I moved here. I’m nowhere near my dream tech job. Things aren’t the utopia that was envisioned. The money isn’t flowing, the bars and restaurants aren’t buzzing with ideas and activities. It’s just not what we had imagined. The changes didn’t meet expectations, but they’re still livable. The town actually is a city, and not the converse. Things are still happening here, there are still choices.

Over these four years, I’ve come to several realizations, many crossroads. I’ve come to understand a lot of things about life, change, growing older, moving on. I may not be the guy I was in 2000, but I’m still me. My health has downgraded somewhat, but I’m still alive. I’ve managed to make small changes towards my future; I quit smoking in February (a big change, actually), I bought a bicycle, I pay more attention to my diet and activity, I’ve left the daily grind behind in the push to shake up my habits, disrupt them so I could get some lifestyle agility back. Small changes, small life, big town.

So, yeah, it’s been a hell of a ride. I plan on living here for a long time. I know my family misses me. I miss my family. I wish I could bring them all down here. But they won’t fit. This isn’t their place. This is my place. I hate thinking about the whole “prodigal son” symbolism, but it’s there. I can’t deny it. But this is my home.

Four years. Damn.

Over the past few days I’ve found myself, on frequent occasion, wondering about the people I used to know in college, the people I used to call close friends, classmates, running buddies. Remembering hanging out, eating dinner, running around Arkadelphia and downtown Hot Springs, talking on the phone, riding bikes around town, etc., and so on. Where are they now? Where am *I* now.

In the off chance that Google indexes this entry, and in the more off chance that my old friends google their own names, listed below is my statement to each of them. The listings are in no particular order.

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Paul Price: I had no idea that the kid I laughed and joked around with at Super Summer in ’89 would have been one of the most influential people in my life. You were one of the major reasons why I went to Ouachita. You were THE major reason why I moved to Greensboro. I’m glad that our paths not only crossed but that they ran parallel. Thank you for opening up the immense world of incredible music to me; you saved this Texarkana metalhead from Led Zeppelin doom. I hope that you are enjoying a great job, excellent health, and a strong circle of friends.

Phil Price: You and I shared a good many years running in the same crowds; hell, I can’t believe we kept finding ourselves going for the same women at the same time; we should’ve used the “dibs” system. Heh. I’ve been meaning to email you and Paul for a while. How’s Greensboro these days? Have you heard from James Scarbrough?

Jack Cates: man, the times. You were my favorite smoking buddy. I know I currently live only an hour north of you, but how have you been? How’s your health? How’s your playwriting? I should write you. Hell, I should come *visit*. That’s a thought, huh? You know Scarborough Faire is going on now….

Tom Armstrong: If not for your level head and your availability to satisfy my need for high-quality chatter, between my two jobs and my classes in the summer of ’94 I would have probably hurt myself. You saved my sanity. Our walks, 48-hour talks, and running the place on the weekends meant a lot, and our trip to Hot Springs at the end of the summer was the most perfect capstone to the whole thing. The last time I saw you was before you joined the Marines. Heh. Sorry that you and Christina unceremoniously untied, no, ripped and slashed the knot. I know you have already had your fill of “I Told You So’s”. None from here. So how’ve you been, man? Seriously, you were important. Speak!

Jason and Elizabeth Files: Oh my god, where have you been? Are you still in Branson? Are you still married? I’ve been meaning to write you, but the addresses I have might be old and cold. I seriously miss you guys. You two *knew* me. You two understood.

Chris and Laura Piland: again, I’ll say thanks for letting me borrow your backup car for that semester. You are a mix of brains and braun, planning and impulse, blessing and charity. You two rule the world. Last I heard, you were in Dallas. Still there?

Karon Edge: you were my first fascination in college. Our week together was super great. I’m sad that I ended up being thicker than mud in the head; understand that I was pretty naive in those days. I just wasn’t “fast” enough. But I had fun nonetheless.

Donna Crochet: you were my first *real* girlfriend. Period. By the time you found me, I had gotten more worldly in my ways than I was in my freshman year. You taught me love. And it was with you that I found all the wrong things to do. We ended badly, we ended very badly, and I do express apologies. That summer was beautiful, and you were the biggest reason. But we’re a long way from 1995. A long way. How is life these days?

Stephen Gent: When I moved into our room in the fall of ’91, I had never met you, I had no notion of you. In fact, I was pretty trepidatious. But damn I’m glad I got to meet you. You had that fire, that kinetic love-of-life spark, the gregariousness I needed to learn. You taught me a LOT about sound, music, and recording. It was super cool living with you in ’91, and totally fun living with you in the summer of ’95. It was through you that I met Donna; that totally rocked. I’m sorry that everything went south between the three of us, and I regret that things have grown cold between you and I. You still have my respect; I can only hope I still have yours. Still married these days? How’s life in Houston?

Russell Files: are you still in the States or back in Germany? Directing music? Know how I can get in touch with Jason?

Jeanetta Bechdoldt: how is my “Jeanetra” doing? Still have the knack to make any clothing look good? Just curious. I always thought you were hot. Just regret never mentioning that to you.

Bob Stephenson: did you ever find your piece of heaven among the limelights?

Scott and Andrea McKane: I miss you guys. Thank you for opening the door of your apartment to frequent gatherings, and for hosting me and others for dinner, movies, and general hanging out. I miss our late-night drives, Zag-Nut runs, and stunt-road drives. Heh. I hope Little Rock is treating y’all well. Don’t stop the music.

Mike and Stephanie Self: you inspire me, even to this day. Idiosyncracies *do* matter; they make us unique. There is no one in this world more worthy of carrying the stark fist of survival more than you, Mike. Teach them all the right way, the way that makes most sense. Stephanie, your obsession with hand crafts, metalwork, and putting the most into the littlest things makes you legendary in my book. How did the dot-com thing treat y’all in Little Rock?

Stephen and Misty Granade: seriously, you two have set up high water marks for me to reach, and as much as I try, I’ll only get close. Your attention to details meant a lot to me. It’s so incredibly cool seeing art and science so perfectly matched in you two. Thanks for expanding my horizons. How’s Durham?

Pam Blackmon: our evening walks and late night talks meant a lot to me. I still miss them. You and Craig still in Boston? I heard about your new kid – you guys rock. I hope for the best for you.

Joelle Neally: woah, mama. You have class, you have style, you have everything to make the boys smile. Heh. You have made an effect on me and the way I communicate; that one day in the cafeteria, I was telling a dirty joke, and while stuttering in the process of trying to clean it up for general audiences, you told me to just say it. Just say it. For once, I heard someone tell me that. That impacted me, and was one of the things that further caused me to look at myself and my beliefs objectively. I’m glad that I got to know you and your no-nonsense attitude. I hope things are going well for you and your family in Greensboro. How is your family? Send my regards.

Michelle and Eddie Weathers: Michelle, it was strange knowing you before I ever met you. Your ceaseless advice and observations were exactly what I needed when I needed them, although I just didn’t know it. Thank you for all the rides between campus and Texarkana, by the way. Eddie, if not for sitting behind you in PreCal our first semester, I probably wouldn’t've met you; thanks for feeding me that first time you invited me to your place; my first taste of ramen. Heh. In later years, you were an excellent and totally laid-back roomate. It was a pleasure. My sincere apologies for never saying “Hi” when I’m in town. You know I love you guys. So how’s the new house? Have any kids yet? Don’t lose touch.

Josh Parker: Man, I still tell stories of you to my friends here. Your antics are legendary. You are the “id,” what can I say? You had balls, you weren’t afraid to show them, and you made everyone have a good laugh. Thank you for lightening things up, even when you were down. I hope you’ve found your peace and happiness. Keep shocking rocking the world.

Doug Waller: your matter-of-fact attitude and your quiet tour-de-force outlook on life were refreshing. You helped me keep my sanity in College Algebra. You were one of the brave few on that campus who’d not only play porn on your TV, but would do so with the volume turned on and other guys there helping to call color commentary. That was always a trip. If you’re still married, tell Jeena “Hi” for me. Get in touch, bro.

James Scarbrough: man, where the hell have you been? Don’t tell me you’re still in Biloxi. You were one of my best friends, man. When you cracked open your tough shell long enough to let me know more about who you were, that meant a hell of a lot. Damn. WHERE ARE YOU?!

Nate Cartwright: heh. After school, you kinda disappeared. I really hope you got a good tech job and career. You were always good for stuff like that. Our friday night X-Files ceremonies were important: thanks for offering your room as an altar. Heh. How’s Angie? How’s Chris? Know where James is? Get in touch!

Rix White: we didn’t always run together, but we still ran in the same circles. You usually led the way on your own path, and you added so much color to our drab campus. Thank you. How’s life?

Chad Pollock: I know we didn’t always agree on things. Hell, towards the end, we agreed on very little. But I think there, at the very end, we came to a concensus. I hope I was able to reconcile. I miss you, man; I miss your head-on dedication to whatever it was that you were doing. You and Rix and a few others were some of the only christians I knew who had it *right*. Thank you for your balanced viewpoint and your pointedly difficult questions.

Tony Christiansen: Living across the hall from you for so long means we’re friends, right? Hehe. Kidding. Does “goony-goo-goo” ring any bells? Haha. Your oddities aside, I did have fun hanging out with you and debating arcane things. How you been, man? Find your ministry job of choice?

Mark White: my favorite Republican. How is D.C. treating you? Did you make it there? Thanks for loaning me your computer in ’93 when you were interning for the summer. That made the world.

Todd Marshall: man, you dropped out of the picture. Called your grandparents; heard you moved to Texas. We had a connection, man. I wonder about you.

Rochelle Cannedy: good god, girl. I seriously regret not expressing to you how incredibly beautiful you were; did you know that I forgot to breathe when I first saw you? Thank you so much for hanging out with me during my dorm night-security shifts. You so totally rock.

Chris and Tanya Schee: you two were definitely unique. After y’all transferred to Henderson, you kinda dropped out of the picture, but I still remembered you. Still knew you. You kids doing ok?

Homer Meyer: yeah, even you meant something to me. Your attentions were so fervently on computers; you knew them, you understood them. You inspired me. Last I heard, you were in Arizona. How goes, man?

J.L. Hixson: although we only lived together our freshman fall semester, you offered me a completely different viewpoint than what I was accustomed to. You had a gung-ho attitude, and enough cockiness to boot. You taught me a mountain about being outdoors. It’s because of you that I enjoy walking and hiking at night; it became a necessary pastime in my later college years. If not for your training, and if not for your insistence on using no flashlight at night, I probably would’ve gone mental without the outlet of nature and solitude. I hope you’ve found your prize in life.

Glen Fowler: you meant a good deal to me. You were quiet, and you expressed friendship and support through your actions. Our nights of sneaking into the Physics lab to play computer games after hours totally rocked. Your skill at guitar was excellent. You were that odd balance between god and metal that I just couldn’t comprehend without opening my eyes. And, again, thank you for lending me your copy of “Stairway to Heaven” – that was immensely important in helping me to finally remove my rose-colored glasses, and to not only view things objectively but to view them with my own eyes instead of the eyes of someone else. I hope that you’ve found your sanity and that your retreat to your home town has given you suitable respite to become your own man again, whole and resolute in advancing yourself. It is good to have known you.

It is good to have known you all.

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Out of my entire history of keeping journals, both online and offline, this is perhaps one of my most difficult entries to write. I’m trying to roll through those five and a half years, flip and fan fast-forward through their faces, jogging my memories, remembering the names. It’s nowhere near complete; it’s not thorough in the least, but these are the people who stick out to me the most. These people have meant the most. In the compilation of this list, I’ve actually shed a few tears. I felt something with these people. I remember these people.

It is my hope that they remember me.

It’s interesting, the breadth and depth of the people we lose contact with. Amongst recent days full of recollections of days gone past, it’s unsettling to bring back those memories of places, atmospheres, and people, close people, and then to look around and find nothing, no one, like it was. The best you can hope for is to see glimpses, taints, of the people you knew in the people you know now.

It’s approaching mid-summer now, and I’m looking back into time. Only one time period can be seen; it’s the summer of 1995, my last summer in college. Halcyon days they were. I was living on campus that summer, as I had for the previous three, only during this particular summer I had no classes, no courses; only my dayjob at the campus printshop, my newborn adult mind, and my handfull of close, close friends. I stayed in the dorm just to the west of Francis Crawford dorm, top floor (which oddly was the ground floor on one end). Communal showers. No running water in the room. Shared ventilation. Low ceilings. Small closets. Really odd, odd accomodations, but my roomate and long-time friend Stephen Gent and I made the best of it. Had a hell of a time there.

Stephen, earlier in the spring semester, introduced me to his friend and classmate Donna Crochet. Over the spring semester, as I had a part-time security job in the Francis Crawford dorm lobby, I got to spend some time with Donna, helping her to heal from that night’s damage inflicted on her by her then-boyfriend Richard who treated her badly. Every night she’d come in either laughing or crying, and we’d sit and talk in the lobby as I tended to my arduous door-watching duties.

A few weeks from semester’s end, Donna gave up on her boyfriend; it was forthcoming to say the least. Stephen and I were both cheering her on towards that goal. By summer, Donna was a free woman and ready for another try with another guy.

I had discovered that Stephen would be staying on campus during the summer to take two classes, and we sought each other out for a rooming arrangement. Our partnership then would have vast effects on the future of that summer. We had discovered that Donna would be staying that summer as well, taking a class. Stephen and Donna decided they could make some extra cash by working at Magic Springs Amusement Park 30-minutes away in Hot Springs, with Stephen working sound at the stage shows and Donna working tickets. Proved to be a good arrangement. I would work my dayjob, come back to my room at 4:45pm, chill out for a bit, make some dinner, listen to some loud music, and around 8 or 9pm, Stephen and Donna would come home from Hot Springs, usually with some ongoing conversation and a plan for the evening.

Now, there’s something you have to understand about Ouachita Baptist University: since the charter of the university is Baptist in nature, and a large portion of the funding for the place came from Baptist dollars, you’re damn-right they upheld Baptist principles. So, not even during the summer was inter-sexual visitation allowed. Each sex could visit the other sex’s dorms only in the lobby, and during limited hours at that. Well, during the summer of 1995, I had been there for 5 years, poured tons of money (and vaporbucks) into the school, I was a senior, and I would be damned if my dorm’s Resident Assistant (a fellow schoolmate) was going to say anything about Stephen and I having girls in our room. Seeing that it was easier to get women into our room that to get us into theirs, mine and Stephen’s room was the hangout for most of our friends.

Ok. So Donna grew up as one-half of a pair of twins. She was always accustomed to having someone sleeping in the same room where she slept. In that situation, she slept better, more at ease; couldn’t sleep well without a roomate. Stephen understood this, and asked me if I had any problem with Donna staying the night while her summer roomate was gone to Little Rock for the evening or the weekend. I had no problem with that, and we made her a nice, thick pallet on the floor. A few more sleepover evenings later, and the sleeping on the floor became a shared bed with Stephen (seperate covers, of course). I will admit I felt a little guilty about making her sleep on the floor. She deserved some mattressed, covered real-estate in the sky with us, right? So, there she was, sharing his bed. No biggie, no problemo. We all said good night Johnboy, giggled, and nodded off to sleep.

By next weekend, the Donna-Stephen sleeping arrangement was getting old: apparently they both move around a good bit when asleep, and on those twin-size beds, that’s not a good thing. So I suggested she sleep with me, seperate covers, head-to-foot, etc., etc. That was rough sleeping, I will say that much. A girl, close to my age, in my virgin bed. Sheesh. I didn’t get much sleep that night. The next time around, I got even less; I told her she could sleep head-to-head. At this time, it was all still quite plutonic, but the tension was there. A few more evenings, and I get brave enough to allow her to share my covers; it’s less she has to sneak in, less to crowd our tiny bed.

Later that night, something happened. In the twilight of the Arkadelphia night, under glow of stars, moon, and campus streetlights, we made out. Snoozy, half-asleep, with slumbering Stephen in the next bed, we made out. The relationship between Donna and I was redefined that night. The next day we sat outside on one of the stone benches and just talked, trying to sort out what happened. Up until that point, Donna had been talking with me to see if we’d like to date, to be an item, and I was generally reticent on the idea. But that night changed it all. Throw hormones into the mix, and you can expect drastic changes.

So, over the course of the next days we continually changed our definitions. It had been 5 years since I last dated someone, and I was taking it as slowly as I could while still embracing the hope, the prospects, in something new. It was a new energy to me, a stranger inside whom I had to meet again. That friday night, Donna offered to have me stay in her room for the night. It was there and then that we gave ourselves up to each other for the first time. As humbling as the fumbling was, we had found peace in her bed, in her quiet room, in each other’s arms.

That summer sticks strong in my mind as I remember this season’s past. I can’t help but to remember the look of Verser Theatre, at the intersection of Pine Street and Ouachita Avenue, just in front of our summer dorms. I can’t help but remember the sun’s glare from those buildings; the breezes; the heat from the asphalt, concrete, brick and stone; the well-maintained grass; the thick shade of old trees; the parking lot to the side were Donna and I rediscovered the openness of communication and garnered the heady resolve that got us through the rough, unsteady days of our early courtship; the cool nights at Lake DeGray, at the picnic table by the crooked tree, where Stephen, Donna and I, and a few other friends would congregate with wine coolers after closing hours and night-swim; the gazebo by the Ouachita river where Donna and I would play and press into each other for hours, damning all the mosquitos and the glare of the student center at the top of the cliff above.

And it’s funny how eight years can change and tear away everything. The last time I heard from Donna was just after our breakup in the fall of ’95. Last time I heard about her was in 1998, through Stephen. And the last time I heard from Stephen was two years ago in a brief email. Our time together was sweet, and it’s sad that our trio came to an end.

I was eating out tonight, after work, and I saw a woman who came in as my meal was nearly finished. I looked her over, and I saw a faint hint of Donna. She wasn’t her, but it was enough to spark the memories.

My time has passed on, and all I hear are echoes, praying for sounds to be born again.

Ping?