novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ghosts from my past (Jolie asked me to tell her a ghost story, so this is what I said:) During high school one of my best friends was J, this extremely awkward and fascinating art guy. He walked with an exaggerated bounce because one of his feet formed wrong. His paintings were so good that they were featured as examples of perfectly scored work in the AP testing pamphlet. He had art schools calling him with full funding night and day but he ended up in a sad place for a wh-- I'm getting off track. One night in high school J and I drove to the Ventura Pier and walked along the boardwalk, watching people slide in and out of the 2 am shadows, cats darting under the boulders propped up against the seawall separating the boardwalk (just a gigantic sidewalk, really, with trees in the middle) from the beach, and drunks on the swingset. The drunks let us down because we loved to swing at night, dragging our toes through the sand, watching the lights on the oil barges twinkle sadly on the thin little horizon. So we walked a little more, and came to rest against a balcony stretching over the feral cat-infested boulders, the beach just below us. I noticed someone walking along the line of whitewash left on the wet sand by the receding waves. She was wearing a white sun dress and looking out to sea, her hair blowing in the wind. My first thought was, What the hell is this? Sleeping With the Enemy? I watched her a moment, goggling at how she could stride so stoic and measured without looking at where she was going or wincing as her feet made contact with the hundreds of rocks washed up in that particular spot. Her body didn't shift as she walked over the rocks, no shift at all. No lift from stepping up and over an obstacle. My eyes followed the line of her sun dress, down to its hem. She had no feet. I jabbed J in the arm and he said, without looking over at me, Yeah, I see it too. And then he laughed. 3:47 pm - 01.30.04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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