Mark My Words: Remy

Something to consider: we have made it a few weeks since you sliced your thumb along with the onion in my kitchen that night we had another argument. I couldn’t tell if you were crying because of the onion or the blood or the fighting.  Our fights are often, but the crying is less so.  You sat on my living room floor, silent with your knees all knotted up to your chest.

A memory: before you wade out there you want to know if it’s watertight.  Well, I say, it’s a canoe and it’s floating and there’s no water in it – what do you think.  You pretend like you’re afraid; I don’t think you are, I think you just don’t want to get the hem of your dress wet.  Your skin is all sunburnt and peeling off your shoulder blades, tender and covered in ephemeral freckles: they appear each year in June and are gone before Fall sends leaves tumbling from the trees.

Another memory: the beginning our friendship. A high school teacher’s hurried mistake in a scribbled sign hanging from the door, “I have three hundred students.  Please be patients with me.”  Our snide commentary at fourteen, under the breath, through our braces. Discussing our teacher mistaking the words: patients/patience.  What an idiot. We trumpet intelligence in laughter and pointedly display our prowess, crossing through his pencil with an ink correction.

There are so many past arguments that keep themselves alive in us and eat up our memories.  I worry I will lose the summers and our teenage years, my mind too busy analyzing this argument or that one, forgetting that while our friendship falls sometimes – slips like viscose from our shoulders to a pile of shimmering fabric on the floor – it also waits for us to lift it, yell, shake the wrinkles free, cry, and wrap ourselves in it again.

In my kitchen, the fabric fell and you tried to leave it there. Maybe you were distracted by the blood, maybe the leftover silences from past fights were clamoring for your attention, but you must understand: we have spent too long as friends.  Too many of your decisions have been made on my advice, and likewise.  At this point, we have no choice.  I sat you on the floor and we ate almond/raspberry cake and drank two bottles of wine and while at the end of the night we hadn’t forgotten the whole thing, it was hazy with alcohol and once you realized I couldn’t apologize properly because, as usual, I didn’t understand properly, you dropped it.

There is always an incongruity.  The fights come from a differing in opinions and the shock in realizing that despite ten years of friendship, we are still surprised by these differences.  It is never about the present, always about a past event remembered incorrectly on both sides, each trying stubbornly to explain the “truth,” each refusing to bend from their history.  The problem: the need to be right, stems from competition, but this competition is so inherent and fundamental in our friendship that trying to discuss it is like trying to explain to a child why – when you’ve just told them they can grow up to be absolutely anything – they can’t grow up to be a kitten.  It’s impossible.

We are bound and interlaced. There will be no undoing us, only pulling the knot tighter, making it hurt for a moment before it loosens again around our wrists and our torsos.  It is when we are fighting that I feel you closest to me, fabric taught and both of us straining – not to pull away, but to pull through the other, leaving substantial residue to be reconstructed, analyzed, and finally understood. We strain against one another until I can’t tell if what I am fighting is your body or mine: we grow into one  flailing shape until we settle ourselves on the floor and reclaim our own limbs.  Then, we each present a personal summation of the facts, the other pretends to understand, we finish the wine and a plan for lunch in the next week or so – sometime between now and next we fight.

Tags: fights, friendship, memories, prose, wine