ix

"You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive."

-Author Unknown Let’s pretend it was me

            I am sitting in this bookstore on a Saturday night, surprisingly content to not be doing anything: no wild parties, no rushed text messages with their letters messerdr up and abrvtd, no screaming friends and rap-heavy mix CD's. It is just me, alone with the Muzak and the five other customers. And the books.

            For two hours I have been in this book store of price tags and wall-to-wall-carpeting, reveling in the mused silence of the words of Unknowns, with their self-published memoirs of hauntingly beautiful insignificance.

            I am alone in this foldable corner chair, with these books, with only myself, with the silent prayer that, at any moment, that girl will tell me to come see her, that there is something to this night other than the first editions and me and the cashier with the lip ring who is wondering why I am not purchasing anything, taunting him.

            And now, somehow, I get a phone call, even though I have no signal, and it is rushed and desperate, as if the weight of the world is resting on my attendance at this t-shirt casual get-together, as if the world will collapse in on its Atlas shoulders without my poor parking job and loud Paul McCartney music heralding my savioric arrival.

            So I rush. I rush in my father’s car. His car, white and sleek. And I am rushing. In his car. Past the red lights (and, once, the flash of a Big Brother picture post.) And I am rushing. Towards my largely-ignorable curfew. Towards something that I am missing in my Pinsky, Rumi, Heaney pick-ups, bagged and buckled-into the passenger seat of my father’s pristine leather.

            But as soon as I arrive, I am back in the car again, now with that girl next to me, in my father’s leather passenger seat, and she is pressed next to paperback Pinsky, Seamus stepped on, forgotten. Damnit. I shufflingly push the buttons on the radio, my father’s radio, nervous and tired, still searching. Damnit. And I hit the brakes after another wrong turn.

We are searching for something pointless, unimportant, trivial. But this is the most important night of our lives, of our week.  Because we will never again have this chance to blow off the responsibilities and promises that are digitally being reminded to us through curse-laden black, block, LCD letters and vibrating phones in cup-holders. Because we have less than a month until the nervousness of newness becomes physically apparent in our eyes and through our skin.

Because soon I will be sitting in a new, far-away book store, finding a better translation of the Great Esteemed Poet and Scribe Rumi, and she will be many highways away, and the Great Esteemed Poet and Scribe Rumi will remind us both through his sand-tanned beard:

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,


no matter whether that friend is moving away from you

or coming back toward you.