Strangers, Continued

The truth is, and this becomes clearer with the passing of each hazy day, that I am forgetting so many of the details of my meticulously average and amazing life. If I tell you that I remember cooking tortellini with store-bought pesto for 4 out of 7 days while living in Vermont, will it be enough to start a story about that amazing year when I was twenty? When I tell you that we couldn't afford cable TV so instead watched two VCR tapes (a Warren Miller ski film and Andrew Dice Clay Live) over and over and over again, will it be enough to reanimate the year I lived in a two-bedroom log cabin with four other people? Will it be enough to make interesting the year I skied every day and wore braids like Heidi and goggles only backwards and was the Employee Spotlight of the Month?

I remember their real names, those strangers I spent those months with, but I wonder if I could remember it all and it worries me, what I might be forgetting.

There were better parts of that year then what at first bubbles to the top, funnier parts and weird and scary parts too. There was a love affair kicked off over the telephone (in a phone booth! on the side of the road!) and there was another one that eluded me entirely because I thought I didn't actually know any lesbians. There was a turning point, a fork in the road, and I have no idea, even now, why I made the choice I did. Because until I did? I was sure I would stay there forever. 

I remember that Chris (or did she spell her name "Xis"? I think she did) ate little else but Fluff and chocolate frosting and that her dad was a train engineer from Indiana and that I am pretty sure she had sex with her cousin before she ran away from home. Mark was from Vermont and he was even shorter than me and when I slammed into the deer that one night, I remember how he shivered a violent kind of shake after he climbed back into my truck having "done it." It took five more miles for me to realize what he meant. Five long miles. He was such a good, tiny little person.

I remember the way my gloves smelled, all sweaty and wet and half-frozen. I remember how the cabin smelled when we would peel off our ski clothes after work, dump them in a pile by the front door. I remember how steam would billow from our hair when we would gather in our long underwear for another night of cheap beer and dirty, smutty, Dice Clay jokes. I remember I felt happy and terrified simultaneously almost every day. Store-bought pesto brings it all back in waves sometimes. I still use the same brand. 

I do not, however, remember what it was that made me leave. I can still see those nasty chin hairs on Jeff, the ones I wanted so badly to pluck and rip out of him, but I cannot remember the split second when I knew I had to go. These were strangers who I lived with and loved for a short and forever time and whose very presence, whose very traveled road was the one I didn't take. 

I doubt they remember my name now, that toothy blonde girl, the one they told secrets to on the hoods of cars when the mud took over the snow. I doubt they remember me because I don't do goodbyes and so just left, even when I said I was coming back, and so just left, because I felt regret instantly, and so just left, because once they went back inside and the cabin filled up the entire space of my rear view mirror, I knew that there was nothing more I could say and I knew I would never see them again and so, I just. Left.

There are the strangers like Dahlia and Sandy, and there are strangers like these: short-term strangers, people I actually know but don't keep. People I leave behind, who I watch walking away while I run away to another life in my deer-smashed car. All these people I keep in some pocket, in some tucked away place, with all the other memories or at least the detailed tid-bits of those memories, the smells and the sweat and the pesto even: the things I save like a child saves an acorn or a headless Lego guy or some meaningful sweet treat someone gave, now mushy and smashed and still yummy.

Months would pass and I would slide into my truck in some cut-off cords to another job, in some local place, near my home. I would be alone, without the love affair or the boyfriend who dumped me, and I would be literally in-between: waiting for four more months of no school and a resume-padding job in DC. No ski pants required, no Dice Clay, a basement apartment and a mattress on the floor. With students. Studying students. 

I would slide into my car and turn on the AC. I would hit the gas and gun it even. I would push in  the cassette tape and crank the volume. I would get three seconds from my parents house, barely out of the driveway, when the deer hair that coated my engine for months would unfurl itself and cover me, spraying out of the vents, shooting out like a hose, like God and Mother Nature combined into one, and while I could still see the road, I could see nothing else, feel nothing else, smell nothing else but that deer hair that coated me and covered me and got caught up in my own hair.

Someday, I will eat a clam on a half shell again or taste saffron or polenta or see some worn out bar stool or some other Sandy with her thread hanging out. Someday all of this day's memories will shoot back like deer hair out of a vent and I will cry on the side of some road. I will pull over and weep and feel some regret for not having felt it all, for not having felt it as much as I could have, or as much as I should have, or as much as I wanted to. 

I will sit in some car on some road and I will find some tiny memory, some tiny detail, to remind me of what I always forget -- that we can never remember things as well or as much as we want to.