Washed out in the sea of memories 



I go in a reverie while pupil does a necessary but boring work and suddenly see in a flash back that friend of long ago, her hippie flowing dress of perhaps twenty years ago, her slight frame that, with her note somehow reminded me of a bird, perhaps a sparrow... We were never together as a couple, I never was in love with her, there never was the smallest hint of a possibility.. why, then, do I get this sort of romantic daydream with her as the protagonist?

I have a few images of hers. We went sometimes together in the local fast food joint, Tropi Burger where nobody ever bought burgers but fried chicken and fried arepas and coleslaw. She would have the arepas and the coleslaw... she was, apart from my hippie friends far away in Merida, the only vegetarian I knew... She was a cellist but I have no recollection of ever watching her play. Doesn't mean she wasn't good at it, perhaps it only means that I was probably too self-centred to pay attention to something that was vitally important to her but perhaps in the periphery of things for me. She worked in a different branch of the Youth Centre to the one I taught guitar at, she taught general music, theory, solfeggio, that sort of hting. She with our common friend Laury, being the more quiet friend. Meeting her for quiet conversations, a drink, a bit of salad. That birthday of hers in which Laury and that boy that seemed to be so comprehensively in love with her playing sirupy Cuban love song for her, changing the 'Yoanda' of the title for her name, played on a guitar and a cello and tears all round when they'd finished....

I miss her now. Perhaps for no particular reason that she is yet another friend I've lost contact with, I would like to know of. And yet my life is now so far away in time and space, full of things other than those which filled our time then, all those years ago in the warm, vibrant, extremely dangerous heart of Caracas, under the sun and the blazing blue sky, by the side of the mountains and the Caribbean, far away and long ago... 

Posted: Tue - August 24, 2004 at 05:18 PM          

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