glamerican fiction

Its really only a matter of time before we pass each other in a bookstore and either pretend not to notice or force a surprised tone and feign happiness for how well the other seems to be doing, or how far they’ve come in life ;it’s the kind on emotion which one can only express if they havent listened to a word that’s been said. Its unique exclusively to repressing the memory of a person who isn’t gone.

that’s what friends are for.

They grow up and apart. They grow up, they move on. They give you a base mark. Or that’s what we all like to think.

I saw Jordan in the dressing room of a small trendy and overpriced boutique. She would go on to become a weather girl. Her forecasts and her bust line wouldn’t fool anybody in any city.

Mary Anne I would see in a gas station, buying a butterfinger and paying for gas and a diet coke. Tall, tan and gorgeous as usual. She would have an extremely buff and guido boyfriend waiting impatiently in the car for her tapping the steering wheel with an exasperated look.

Johnny would drunkenly hit on me in an after hours joint a few times before he would eventually realize who I was. Then a few more times before he remembered how much of an asshole he always to me in school. How many jokes and laughs he had at my expense. I would entertain the idea of vengeance the first few times before I deciding it wasn’t worth it.
Mr. Montfries my French teacher would sit next to me at the one and only AA meeting I would ever go to, as moral support for my sister who had woken up naked in somebody’s back yard a week before. Mr. Montfries wife was known for giving tutoring sessions that yielded notoriously slim improvements in the ability to actually conjugate verbs.

Bennett would do lines with me in the bathroom of this one club that had a good show every few weeks. She would always look like she had been up for days crying, I was never convinced it was solely due to the blow. But I’m sure that never helped the matter either.

Matt and Elliott, the twins were always fighting. Years of ’maturity’ would never change that. With some it never does. I it would rain the night that Stephen would have his gay assistant carry me out to the car when my heel broke, and we would pass the duo brawling in the parking lot. One would eventually notice and think that I looked a little like me; but not enough to say anything. Later that night and early into the next morning Stephen and I would get into a Jesus brilliant fight about me not being impressed enough with his his bank account and that he could do better. His assets were more than impressive but not why I was with him, and he would go on to do better.

Kayla's family would unknowingly hire Marcus to play bagpipes for her funeral. I would hear him tuning from outside the men’s room and never let myself ask exactly how one goes about tuning a bagpipe or how to know if its out of tune. At the time it would seem inappropriate and out of place, and I would probably never get the chance or remember to ask again. I would later when “friends” of ours went out to a sports bar for drinks. And to remember Kalya, and of course freeze with the fear that even the gymnasts, and health nuts out there aren’t in shrouded bubble wrap.


I would see Monica on the news when her family hadn’t heard from her for a few weeks after she had joined some new age movement. Her remains were identified due to her dental records, the braces that she had always been so proud of as a little girl. “Monica Shaw….” I would mutter “that the name sounds sooooooooooooooooooo familiar” to my fiance. But I just couldn’t place it. Probably because she had dyed her hair green like all the rest of them. That engagement was remarkably brief and ended quite abruptly for some reason or another. I forget why exactly.

I would see Evan out in the college town bars acting as if he was blind, quite convincingly with his dog and sunglasses. Giving folded fives or ones in lieu of the 20s or 50s that he should be paying. Even with every shadow of a doubt that he could have had e ruined when he would wink at me as her back was turned. He had always been a snake.

One day I may look back at these blips of my past and others futures. Time is a creation of man, and exists solely for the purpose of convenience. Waiting until something happens, or how long since something has. Perhaps I had mistaken one person for another, or my memory had been clouded due to the dust storms of my own life. But sitting here alone with my memories I take comfort in the fact that if I can remember things so insignificant of others that had floated languidly in and out of my life that somewhere or someday somebody else will remember me talking too loudly, crying in a booth, or helping a stray dog cross the street safely. Isnt that all we have really? The stories we have to tell, or is it the ones that we ourselves cannot tell, ones that have to be told for us?