Ghosts

My friend and I wound up driving through the town where our old high school was yesterday because of some construction that blocked the route we'd intended to take to get home.  We started talking and reminiscing over things, places and people, and one individual in particular made her say, "Why were you ever friends with her?  She was crazy."  I paused a minute and thought about the person she was talking about.

The person in question had once hit the long flat reservoir bridge with the accelerator pedal all the way down, pegged her speedometer at 120 while looking at me wide-eyed, yelling, "Are you scared?!!  Are you scared?!! Scream!!"  I stared back at her like I was bored, saying, "No.  I don't know what you're talking about," before I looked away.  There are nasty curves on either end of the bridge, and I can't say I didn't have a tight grip on the door handle beside me, but I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction.  Not even if it meant we wound up in the water.  That incident pretty much defined our friendship.  It ended over some lies told sometime after our Senior Prom (oh GOD...Prom...there should be no Prom, or at least it should come with a warning label for ridiculous amounts of drama).  

As all this flickered across my mind, I looked back at it and other events in a sort of astonishment.  I shook my head.  "I don't know," I said. "I guess I sure can pick 'em."  I was silent a moment more, and I laughed a little.  "Her and D. both."  And my friend cracked up.

We'd been on MSU's campus much earlier that afternoon, driving around all the old places where I'd known him, where that Greek tragedy (or tramedy?  there were funny bits, I suppose) unfolded, so he was on my mind.  I can't drive past Simrall or what used to be the ERC without thinking of him.  That campus is haunted by that strawberry blond ponytail and sandals for me.  I don't much like that.  I don't even go to the Wesley when I'm there.  I haven't been back since I graduated.  He would be everywhere, the amazing D. and his Gibson leading the praise band or just sitting moodily in a corner or asleep on a sofa or sitting on the porch swing or doing his homework, and the Wesley was so much more to me than him that this would be a debasement.  

And it's a debasement of MSU, too.  My time there was more than him, more than that damn guitar-playing engineer.  I was more than him and the stupid cycle we were locked into.  I was more than riding around with him late at night, him showing up on my doorstep at ridiculous hours, conversations that never ended but that never exactly headed where they seemed to be going.  More than just that horrible push-pull.  More than just him singing at me, playing for me, playing with me.  

The next time I go, I am going to deliberately think of the rest of it, going to remember flying kites on the drill field, sitting in the arbor until 2 in the morning and talking, playing the piano in the Chapel with the rest of my stealthy anonymous brothers and sisters who rotated through there with me, hanging out and laughing with G. and J. and B. and M. and C. and all the other wonderful people at the Wesley who weren't insane collectors of women to no purpose, creating a giant web of multicolored yarn so thick it had to be cut out in the downstairs apartment of the Wesley as a practical joke, and getting pranked in return for that by the guys who lived there, working at Alley Kat's (except for D's role in it), and Fleur de Terre (except for the time D. brought me roses).  I'm going to drive him out with the other things, and that way, the next time I go through, his memory won't be there; only the good things will remain.