Tonight, I continued my as of yet unsuccessful quest to find photos to fill my yearbook page. In doing so, I stumbled across a picture from last Chanukah, though it seems like much, much longer. The picture is of me and another girl (whom I barely know) framing someone in the center. This girl is tall, thin and porcelain pale. She has frizzy, wildly uneven dark hair- hair that has its own cognition. She is wearing a silk Oxford shirt with thin multi-colored stripes, and a bright red neck scarf spills onto the shirt in an artful flair.
Instantly, this girl is different. She is a startling contrast to the two subdued creatures framing her. At a glance, it is obvious she is an artist. In her clothing, in her eyes, in her her long bony hands that fall like albino spiders over our shoulders. Study her further, and you will read the fierce intelligence in her eyes, and a flair for words which puts me to shame. She is larger than life, a Greta Garbo incarnate who answers only to the highest of authorities. She is brilliantly gregarious, a carnival mirror reflection of reality. And it is here that I begin to pull away.
This girl is my polar opposite in every cognitive process conceivable. I am the base to her acid, the salt to her pepper. Her presence is like cumin and jalapenio in my mouth, bringing fire to my eyes and my brain. Her body swings and her hands flail as she talks, so fast I can hardly hear her. She listens to my mean, measured responses like a child greedily eyeing candy, and then off she goes again, a blur of red and white my eyes cannot follow. Oh, the places we will go, she and I, San Francisco and Manhattan, an unincompasable capacity of imaginary purchases stacking up in heaps beside us. Even as she speaks, the urge for silence and space narrows to a single point of concentration in my brain. Maybe she has to go. Maybe she should call her mother. Maybe she should catch the train. Anything, anything for quiet and peace and a reprieve from the sizzling guilt building in my soul.
I know this girl, and I know she knows me. How she must ache at my cruelty, my intolerance, my lassitude. But... what can I do? My friend and I, we are the same poles of a magnet. Our very similarity, out shared interests have forced an invisible wedge between us. One of us must flip, reverse our polarization, if ever we are to again become compatible.
The only thing is, I've never been terribly flexible. And I find myself wondering, do I want to be?
