the creek years
June 8, 2003 05:04 PM

You were there for the years of sand in my shoes. Metaphorically, literally, some combination.

Sand in my shoes.

Warm. Irritating. Symbolic of freedom from ties and being in slightly the wrong place, the wrong time.

Those years were filled with symbolism, the weight of each grain examined and re-examined in detail. Overexamined, analysed to the point of great weight and inconsequentiality. Someone once told me examinez le poisson, and I took it much too literally.

Critics said from the beginning that the analysis, the talking, were uncharacteristic. It became a joke, a cultural icon, adolescent fifty cent words we said no one used.

We used those words. As with the fish, the kindergarten lesson. No biting. No screaming. Don't cry. Use your words.

We used all of our words. And some other people's words. Sang them and emailed them and digested them with iced coffee and cigarettes and late night hors d'oeuvres.

You were all sand in my shoes. We were all Dawson in our own little visions of the world. Not the ones we saw paralleled in the television, but the ones we actually lived and stormed out of. Or skulked away from, burned, pretended to ignore. So much angst, sturm und drang rivalling even the silliest Romantics. The winter of our discontent spanning years and semesters and apartments.

Of course. Everyone has these years, in some form. Some more formed than others. Everyone looks back with softness in their eyes and calls themselves stupid.

I know you weren't stupid. You may have been carried away on your words, your hormones, the magical magnetism of people storming in and out of the party. But you were never stupid. Nor I.

You were my foils, my archetypal pals, carrying us through the years of sand and sad and watching how our heads grew.