Old contacts

No, I'm not discussing whether or not to discard my disposable lenses. I am talking about old connections, old flames, friends from the past, those people you look up every so often in that old and tattered tome, your yearbook.

Yearbooks. They're a telling media creation meant to substantiate memory of a time in one's life and his/her environs through the portrait studio. Clever marketing perhaps. Essential to memory as well. That we all stand before the camera to capture a representative image is the disciplinary, institutional component to it, sure. But goddamn, yearbooks are (or were) such giddy public displays of self. Hell, they're simply a book of faces, countless smiling, well-kempt faces. And this leads me to my entree. Social media.

Social media, namely something akin to a facebook, is just what it suggests, and it suggestively speaks to that other book of faces mentioned above, the yearbook. This book of faces developed around Harvard and some imposed subdivision of the student body, perhaps by geography (i.e., residence halls). It has taken over or at least its concept has taken over as a means of staying in touch, in effect reaching through that yearbook and speaking to that face as it is now. Strange yes, but media are strange, always. Transcendent, haunting, utterly supernatural media are.

Ah yes, old contacts, that face in that yearbook. I reach back and look for her. But there she was last night, and I almost didn't recognize her. She looked more (how shall I say?) ethnic. Her hair was darker. Her eyes looked darker. She looked vaguely Eastern European or simply Hispanic, that ambiguous other category of whiteness or simply its witness. We made eye contact a few times. The last time I smiled at her. Then she came over and I heard her say my name, and I turned to her. She asked me, "Do you know who I am." I said, "Jill!" "Heather Jill." And she stopped me and said that she doesn't go by "Heather." We made a brief exchange of information and the conversation just died as we kind of nervously stared away. She then walked away and grabbed my arm. I was about to go dance with her shortly thereafter, so I asked the bartender for a shot of courage. And before I knew it she dissolved, first, into the crowd dancing near the stage, and second out the back door, the back gate, and off to an awaiting car where she disappeared for good.

Old contacts. This one was psychically disruptive, not for any simple reason, but for the same conflicted reasons that first befell me when we met back in 1991, outside of the high school. I once asked her to a dance, feeling emboldened by her continuous overtures toward me and the desire to date. Nothing came of it. Nothing. She found her crowd and I, perhaps, visited her home a half a dozen times over the high school years for small parties she had thrown when her mom was out of town. She works down town now, I work construction. This much we shared. I am truly flabbergasted by the encounter. It was on my face and in my odd sentence construction upon our initial meeting. There is no simple reason behind it. We were like two insects trying to mate on a flimsy branch in the wind. I clumsily thrust my sex appendage in her direction. Nothing occurs we each move to opposite sides of the room in a combination of shame and overwhelming sensations too big and jumbled to parse into discreet feelings.

The night ended, and I was moody and sad only because every attempt at contact after that moment failed miserably. The server gave me her patronizing giant wave. Other women absolutely failed to even register my existence. She was there, that one who had smiled at me once before and who had tried to cozy up to me on the dance floor. She fucking hated me. I wasn't there. I deserved that. I didn't register her when she put her neck out. Shame on me. Shame on my shame. Shame.

So the night was a wash. I had a few drinks, broke a button on my new jacket. Chinese high fashion, I call it. I awake at a quarter to 11 with nothing but a haunting vision of the evening and an affect that has since smeared into a million distracting thoughts and activities. I conduct the night's autopsy with my friend Tom, the bartender, by way of a series of self-effacing text messages.

"Some nights I get hurt emotionally."
"I feel cursed."
"Yep. When my mouth opens all the pussies within earshot dry up."

Yep.