He dated some girl named Leslie-- Leslie with the outdated, tin can braces, Leslie with the sheepdog bangs. My first day back in Memphis, she asked me to sit at her lunch table. After a half year of socially defunct Florida schooling, I judged people like an apocalyptic jury. Leslie was one of those awkward, overdeveloped pre-teens whose palms reeked of bleeding Sharpie. God forbid she try to run in her pants-- they were huge, chained parachutes-- and I hope for her pride that she has stopped wearing all of those Anime t-shirts.
She was the first one to misinterpret what I had with him. If you were to ask me how we began conversing, I would have to lie. My memory fails me. I do remember the first song he gave me, though: "Butterflies & Hurricanes," by some British band called Muse. It was the beginning of the most enticing, yet brief encounter I will ever have.
We were always attached to opposite ends of the same headphones, reading lyrics off each other's lips. Everything was euphonic with him. I could find eighth notes dancing among the freckles that decorated his cheekbones, and I could see musical staffs flowing in the waves of his unkempt hair. I veered dangerously close to appreciating the Southern accents; his voice was as languorous and sunken as the bass lines in "Scar Tissue." I had an apple green Ipod mini back then, and as high school loomed near, his illegally torrented harmonies began to carve a lingering beat into my tympanic membranes.
"I'm going to sing you something," he would murmur, "and then it will be your turn."
I would press my ear close to the phone until the walls of my throat could feel his songs. He sang me Sinatra and "Mr. Brightside," until he convinced me that "Hot Fuss" was the soundtrack to my life. I also nursed a personal envy for the Ava Gardener I could never be.
I am so much further than three years away from those blithe nights.
After one semester and too few days of summer, he sent me a trippy song by the Crystal Method and told me he was moving. I brushed it off as a joke. I did not get to say good-bye. I listened to The Dark Side of the Moon CD he burnt for a week straight, and by the end of it I was hoarding a mountain of crumpled Kleenex in my wastebasket. We still had our nightly mutual serenades, and I felt strangely safe. It was the kind of safe you feel under an giant, overworn black hoodie during wintertime. I slept better then.
His cellphone bill escalated to a damning six hundred dollars by October, and we have never really talked since. Sometimes he visits Mississippi, and I drive down there (alone) to pick him up and spend a few days with him. Things are different now; we exchange the occasional broken instant message, but it usually amounts to small talk. An entire Ipod later, his music, including some songs he mixed himself, still haunts my speakers. I can't listen to ten minutes of my library without thinking of that insufferably humid summer.
At the end of May, he will move back to Memphis. He will bring back a playlist of songs I will never hear, and he will speak with a strange accent I will never adjust to. I will be on the other side of the country by August, yet I find myself futilely repressing callow hopes of another summer he will not give me.
"Tell all your Cajun friends that there's an Asian girl in Memphis who loves you more than your own mother," I tell him.
"They'll make fun of m-"
The noise on his bus pressures the phone signal until it crinkles and rips. Connection lost, says my cell screen.
**disclaimer to lurkers and those who don't know who this is about: this friendship was purely friendly.
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