ellen unhinged 'sometimes i have moments of clarity where the things you tell me just click into place and it's so easy and it sounds wonderful. other moments, not so much' and sometimes adult students verify my teaching skills in ways that little ones cannot. 090225 ... kerry you have always been strange but i don’t mind, because most of my friends are somewhat strange. to say i was surprised to hear from you would be an understatement. it had been years since i saw you last, you were very thin leaning against the side of a building waiting with your arms crossed tight, dressed all in black. you looked real sharp, very patti smith. i knew right when i saw your face that things were truly different. after awkward stilted conversation over burritos in the mission you went back to oakland and i trudged up the hill to audrey’s house where i called jackie to debrief. she said it was like that for her when she saw you in brooklyn, that you were a little cooler, more nonchalant than she remembered, that it was startling, and that’s how i felt too. remember in high school how she used to answer the phone, one of us said, remember how she’d sound like a robot, like why are you bothering me, fine, come on over… but we got used to phone-you because that was just one side of you, and when we were actually together it was easy. afternoons reading comics in your room, prowling around town after dark in our busted chuck taylors, baking pot brownies in your kitchen when your parents were out of town, working on our zines at the majestic diner we had the same sense of humor, gory, nonsensical, macabre, verging on juvenile. your mom let us xerox them at the museum where she worked as an archivist, and we left them in coffee shops and record stores and even mailed some to quimby’s in chicago. i visited you in college in massachusetts when the snow was mostly melted, just little gray mountains still dotting the campus, and you and your friends had spread miles of butcher paper on the floor, an ongoing mural, everyone on your floor adding to it bit by bit. so many markers, so much the right kind of strange. you live in brooklyn now, not so far away but you could be on another planet and this time, in another city and another coffee shop, you smiled and hugged me and your voice was the same, your nose and glasses the same, your hair cut in a bob that reminded me of how you cut it in sophomore year (my junior year) and wore those fingerless gloves and your brown member’s only jacket every day. you said if i’m in brooklyn i could stay with you, you said it twice, but i imagine so much painful silence, not the kind of morning-silence with is or the silence with joy that is not silence but being effortless together. i told alex that you and i are out of sync, that i don’t expect people to stay the same but i hate that we didn’t grow together. jackie and i did, even said to each other how lucky we are that we have grown up side-by-side, neither of us straying too far. he said i’ve changed too, that maybe it was the bike accident, maybe we didn’t heal together. the accident happened in berkeley in front of that soul food restaurant, and i was recently out of the hospital still skeletal and disoriented but i called your mother, frantic. she was going to fly out to care for you. i was healing slowly surrounded by care and comfort and reminders of my old self-- tera bringing me rainier cherries mary kathryn helping me walk again johanna bearing truffles from paris a long letter and antique toothpick holder with my initials on it from eve so many cards so many phone calls with audrey in the middle of the night, saying to each other how did that happen to you and how did this happen to me, and thank god you’re back. i missed your brain. and you were putting yourself back together in california, i don’t know how. we shared some laughs this time but i think alex is right, we healed separately and differently, perhaps irreversibly. but i’ll still let you know when i make it up to brooklyn. 211122 what's it to you? who go blather from