feather2pixels

Rachel was in town recently. As I was giving my mouse pad a much needed cleaning, the doorbell rang and she was suddenly standing on my stoop, unmistakably her. After a tour of the premises, we took off in her brother’s hard-clutched Subaru for my San Francisco Highlights tour on a blustery Thursday afternoon. Even though those events were more or less planned, it was one of the more notable visits of my time in Mission.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to describe exactly who Rachel is. My first girlfriend, who I met in the summer of eighth grade at YMCA camp in South Jersey has too many prepositional phrases. At the top of Twin Peaks, where she treaded close to the inner curb (“I don’t do well with heights”), the air tasted thin and the still bay in front of us felt like a memory of something that never happened to me. Really, she was my first great penpal and my first great obsession in a life that has basically been a series of penpals and obsessions. But the idea of a patterned existence seemed reassuring up there. For a year or two, her letters were the only things that made me happy. Today they are among my most treasured possessions. This summer I re-read them and they blew me away. Somehow, they are at once intelligent and well-written, hopeful and heartbreaking. They teem with what it is to be young. Somehow, they remind me of who I am today. And that is fucking crazy.

At one point at Land’s End, she stopped to sit on a rock. Here, the refuge of the bay gives way to the open ocean and today it looked cold and patient. I excused myself to take a piss on an old gnarled tree and then we sat around for a bit until the wind became unbearable. She’s been through a lot since then, Rachel. It was in her eyes. Is it in my eyes, too? Things feel fucked up with me and I can’t even explain to people why.

These days, Rachel is a writer (in the sense of being a writer that I truly respect: she writes). It’s deeply satisfying for me to recognize the passion of her old letters to me in the words she writes today. It’s deeply satisfying to stand on a rock and know something about the essence of someone I don’t really know anymore. I don’t explain much to her on the rock.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 11:53 pm and is filed under favorite spots, friends, postcards & letters, unsolicited sentimentality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.