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Necessary as Air
(Editor's note: This is one of the winning entries in our April writing contest, Memories with Energy. I posted it as I received it. The prompt was to freewrite, and that means no correcting spelling mistakes, punctuation or grammar.)
A portrait of Moummar Qaddafi hung in my bathroom in 1982 because the portrait's owner was one of my junior year roommates in college. The owner and I didn't speak much for six months but when I became suicidal, everything changed. Sally seemed invincible to me. She wore Bennetton in 1982 when no one else had heard of it, and she bought her Benetton items in the European shops, not the ones newly built in Georgetown, where we went to school. She vacationed in Malta, graduated from the exclusive Connecticut private school, Kent, and worked in Tripoli during the summers. Her brother was a handsome, tan playboy and her parents were ex-patriots still living in Libya, and eventually unable to attend her college graduation because they couldn't get out. And I was Jewish at a predominantly Catholic, Jesuit university. I loved my school; it was where I was meant to be and to learn. But I never expected that Sally, of all the people I knew in college, would be the one to save me. Memories could be said to have energy if they're branded in your mind, even if the memory itself is not energy like Einsten formulated it, or like the energy it takes to plan, cook, serve and clean for a party of 25, or delivery a child. My memory of how Sally kept me alive, because she convinced me to stop crying long enough to pick up the phone and call student health services, is as alive now as then because, as I get older, the fact that she and I remain so close, when we started so far apart, serves as a symbol of investment and opportunity: we don't know what some raw material can yield, especially if we've never encountered it before. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't observe it, question it, prod it, consider it. That's what Sally and I did with each other for six months, and have been doing for over 21 years now. She calls me from her cellphone while she drives to the store to get internet filter software to keep her boys from bad sites and catches me while I'm toasting chicken nuggets for my three year old. I send her newspaper clips of stories about 87 year old men who still run marathons, knowing the news will inspire her to feel good about whatever running she continues to do. I don't think there is any energy greater
than the energy which perpetuates a friendship which, to others, sounds
as though it never should have started and yet to the two friends,
becomes as necessary as air. * |
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