6/15/2006

Misplaced on a Thursday

A couple of weeks ago I saw this girl at the mall in my hometown, short black hair and big brown eyes, and I think I was what? Thirteen? Fourteen? Fifteen? –something like that, definitely early-to-mid 1990s- and thinking back about it, thinking of her, well wasn´t she the girl that made me like girls? Boy more than a decade´s gone by and she still looks the same. A little older but the same girl waiting for me by the other side of the fence outside the swimming pool nevertheless; I was off at six in the afternoon then we´d sit somewhere quiet and we´d talk about…
You know, I do have an amazingly good memory for a lot of stuff but I can´t recall for the life of me just what the hell we were talking about. What do teenagers talk about for chrissakes?
- And does that make me ready to be a father? You got the generation gap thing going on right there.

Anyway we´d talk about a lot of things and as usual the girl would be the one talking because say what you will I´m one hell of a good listener. I enjoy watching people, I enjoy listening to people. They´re all characters in God´s book, I think, only I´m a card-carrying Atheist so I´m taking the book as something ghost-written you know just like those Star Trek books allegedly written by William Shatner.
(On a sidenote that metaphor´s really caught me off guard; never saw it coming but loved it anyway. This is me grinning like an idiot at my own joke. This is me to the readership at large: I love being me, I can´t deny it!)

So. There you have the girl and I sitting under a tree just outside the swimming pool and we´re talking, and I´m thinking god look at those eyes, she´s got the prettiest eyes ever not to mention she looks so good in those shorts, what an ass and I got to find a way to take her downstairs past the soccer fields, through those trees just before the parking lot below but I´m also thinking god, I´m so late and I have a Math exam tomorrow to which I haven´t studied, mom´s gonna kill me if I flunk again, I was up all night yesterday going over a few Batman books because I wanted to find this specific panel with the Bat-Plane as drawn by Jim Aparo and I wasn´t sure if the shot was real or I´d just dreamed it up, but look at her, she´s gorgeous and maybe I´m dreaming her up to.
There you go, by the way, teenagers talk a lot about how school sucks and how being a kid sucks because our whole sphere of existence is ruled by older people whom seem all so out of it, and are you going to Andre´s dad´s farm this weekend too? There´s this party around the pool and it´s gonna be so cool, etc.
- I took my 12-year-old cousin to an Avril Lavigne concert last year.

More than ten years later and I´m passing her by at the mall, I´m wondering if she still remembers who am I, what´s my name and that kind of stuff but it´s takes me a split-second to second-guess myself and take my eyes off her, just walk by and not say anything, I mean what´s the point in saying Hi after all these years?
It bothers me however that she´s with this boy- and I´m gonna say boy because some guy in baggy pants with retro-1970s carefully-unkempt hair falling over his eyes is not a man. Guy dresses up like the lead singer for one of these new groups, say Coldplay or the Strokes or something like that (I´m clueless & probably naming bands at random, so that you know)- a golem not of clay but of mud straight out of an Avril Lavigne song, some f*cking avatar to this 21st-century SK8R BOY-ism, and you want me call him a man, c´mon.
Still guess who´s got the girl and who´s the sh*thead sitting alone at the office on a holiday. Nice going, brainiac.
- Struggling with Microsoft Power Point, day two.


[Then all it takes is one single e-mail from the Head Office popping up in my inbox and wham!, this is me getting back to work instead of playing Jack Kerouac, god I have so much to do today and haven´t done anything so far…]