Piano Lounge = awesome.

Work tonight was the busiest I have ever, ever seen it.  Not to be outdone, Mesa also had the longest line I’ve ever had to wait in (spincach, tomato & feta?  Ehhh, turns out cooked spinach still isn’t that great…)

Speaking of work, at the very beginning of our rush, I looked over at the line gathering out the door & a guy about my age had just come in with a group of friends, overweight & with an afro of curly dirty blonde hair extending about a foot over his head.

It was the hair.  Not even bright red, but that apparently didn’t register with me.  You’ve probably heard the phrase “my heart leaped into my throat”?  There is really no other weay to describe the physical reaction I had to this person (the name he put on his bag was Turk) sharing the same airspace as me.  My initial thought was,

“Ohhh cool, Boner came with some of his friends for homecoming!!!”

About 3 milliseconds later, however, I remembered that nope, the jovial afro kid wasn’t in fact my prom date from senior year.  He wasn’t the guy I let get away with giving me shit for all of my dumb high school mistakes when no one else was allowed to breathe even a word of them.  He didn’t even order the Subway equivalent of the BMT, Boner’s favorite sandwich.

This kid wasn’t Boner because Boner isn’t around anymore.  And that really, really sucks.

(Disclaimer: I certainly didn’t mean for this to be only post #3, but this happened today so I’m going to talk about it today, suck it.)

We were too busy making sandwiches for me to lose my composure, but goddamn if I didn’t want to lock myself in the cooler and sob my eyes out.  I full on stared at this kid every chance I had, just willing for the name on his bag to be Jesse, just waiting for him to wink at me and tell me the joke’s over.  I guess I was just surprised at the suddenness of it all– here I am having a perfectly normal day/week/month and then BAM he’s right there, his absence, staring me in the face saying You’re not over it, you may never be; if one of your favorite people in the world can be gone in that quick of an instance, how much faith can you have in the rest?

Like I said, feel free to just skip this one if you didn’t know him or don’t care.  Sometimes I wonder if I dwell too much on it because believe me, I dwell.  People often say “there’s not a day that goes by…” and it’s true.  I think about Boner every day.  I’ve often wondered if I’m remembering him better than he was, but I think we all do that with the deceased (horrible word choice, I apologize, but it is what it is.)  No doubt about it, he could be an asshole.  They were all jackasses, but him always less.  He was always in on the joke with you; while what he said was offensive, it was never malicious.

I won’t even go into how Thanksgiving ‘08 will be the defining moment for our class, how much we’ve all changed and grown apart as a result of it.  Thinking about it, I didn’t really tell any of my college friends when or after it happened.  Describing him wouldn’t do knowing him justice, and I guess I don’t want to be that girl who has the dead friend so be extra nice to her, ok? 

In closing, I have no idea why I blogged about this.  Perhaps because there are approximately three people, on a good day, in my life actually reading this and this might be of some relevance to them.  Perhaps because I’ve wanted to talk about it for a really long time, like 11 months long time, but no one else likes to acknowledge it happened.  Perhaps because sometimes I just really miss the shit outta him & when freaky look-alikes are spotted I’m not strong enough to not notice and be really, really floored by it.

Weems’ class, while reviewing for a vocabulary quiz sophomore year.

“What does ‘predilection’ mean, Jesse?”

“Before an election.”