one summer afternoon, i now remember, a friend and i went to this cliff carved crassly by a sudden storm. the shaley cliff now abutted excitedly far into the green shoal. and we took this sweet and piercing pleasure at ourselves hovering over the water, our restless heels kicking up the loose under lip of the cliff. the wild plonk, plonk, plonk of the pieces of sedimentary coral and sand free falling into the water, i now remember so clearly.
another friend of mine, the one who is now vacationing back home, emailed me the other day just to tell me that he chanced upon my old time buddy, the one i spent that summer afternoon with on the cliff, and that he said hi. i couldn't remember now, much as i tried, to distinguish in my mind how this friend looked like. was he the one with the really bad broken elbow or the one whose palms sweated?
i've always been a bad friend, one who cavalierly quits memories for the convenience of the current. and yet, what a happy, comforting thought -- such an undeserved gift -- that somehow, friendships, good deeds i've somehow miraculously done before, before all this irreversible hardening of my core ever commenced, have this persistence, this tenacity to run on, to circulate in the universe in one form or another. this unremembered friendship somehow lives on like a closed book on a forgotten shelf insistent on telling itself its unending story.
