by Gabriel Cassidy

One time during my incredibly impressionable youth–I believe I was about twelve–I knew a kid whom I will refer to as E. This E had grown up in a house with a stepfather who mercilessly beat the shit out of him until child protective services was forced to intervene. E was a musician who never owned an instrument. Drums, he would tell me, were to be his specialty. His stepfather owned a drum set, but E was given strict orders never to touch them. Once, his stepfather caught him tapping the hi-hat cymbal playfully with his hand and, in his eyes, this was cause for a particularly cruel and unusual form of punishment. He grabbed both of his drumsticks and beat E within an inch of his life. E never, to the best of my knowledge, touched that or any drum set ever again, electing instead to develop the peculiar habit of tapping his collar bone with the fingers of his right hand in the style of various drumbeats.

E was a performer. Our English composition course produced a variety of plays adapted from the ubiquitous “required reading” novels of jr. high’s everywhere (e.g., The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Christmas Carol, etc.) He played an impeccable Scrooge, and an almost uncomfortably believable Tom Sawyer. During our lunch breaks from these performances, he and I would skip off to the restroom and inhale glue in the bathroom stalls. This developed into a habit. We would often ditch classes, assemblies, lunch periods, prospective make-out sessions with women, and even whole play rehearsals for the temporary euphoric feeling provided by the solvent. Strangely, while I would be rendered incapable of basic speech–and physically reduced to slightly above a vegetative state–E would continue about his day relatively unscathed, returning from class or rehearsals with only a slight slur in his speech, which actually served him quite well in his Scrooge performance.

A year prior to my acquaintance with E, I had fallen in love with a girl whom I will refer to as J. She was a goddess and the first woman in our school to develop breasts–the primary source of my friends’ envy when I eventually began dating her. She had an immaculately smooth crescent-shaped face, an adorable sharp nose, and beautiful golden hair that descended to her shoulders like water flowing unyieldingly from a faucet.

I dated J on and off throughout much of my pre-adolescent years, never seeing too much of her during school; however. This was due primarily to the fact of her being an unmotivated student, a “condition” that is often confused with stupidity in the public school system. Thus, she was placed in remedial courses taught by teachers whose talent lied more so in enforcing Bush’s No Child Left Behind law than relaying information to students.

During one of our relationship breaks, J had navigated her way closer to my circle of friends, developing an attraction towards E. This did not cause a rift between us; however, but, perhaps out of the looming fear of loneliness, my fascination with J was soon reignited. In between one of our glue sniffing marathons, we had decided–right there in the school’s bathroom stall–that we would share her. She said yes which, once we had sobered up, was an earth-shattering shock to both of us.

Despite her academic contempt, she was a poet. She was an artist. We often spent whole afternoons at her house, listening to poems and songs that she had written. Her parents’ garage was dubiously filled with canisters of paint and gasoline. Each of us would take turns climbing in through the window, reaping the stimulating benefits of these inhalants. We would then return to her room and lay on her bed together, staring at various portraits she had drawn and taped to her wall. Portraits of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and, of course, Kurt Cobain. These afternoons never progressed towards anything sexual, other than occasional kissing and one particularly exhilarating moment when she decided to take a bath while we waited in her room. E and I both urged the other to ask her if one of us could join, but neither of us had the courage, and thus her nude body has forever been a mystery.

A year later I was informed by my parents that I would be moving to a new state on the opposite side of the country. Idaho. One of God’s mistakes. It has been almost a decade since I last saw either of them, yet their memory still lingers within the bowls of my psyche with an arrogant confidence. And as I sit here, solemnly recounting the episodes of my past, perturbed by the potential absence of such relationships in the future, I think about the innately fleeting nature of time, and my own inability to appreciate what is present. And I often wonder where they are.