Spring Days In Exile (Part 1)

It was one of those perfect weather days I immediately wished would just end. It was absolutely beautiful outside, like so many 75 degree spring afternoons in Southern California. But my spirits were not tied to the temperature or the clarity of the air.

Kids were coming home from school, walking through the streets outside my window, laughing, smiling cause an unusually cold winter had finally made it's way south.

I shut the shades a little tighter.

I didn't want to go anywhere, I didn't want to see anybody, I just wanted it to be some other day in the future. So I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling but in reality focusing on the thoughts playing back and forth in my mind. That cursed organ or concept or whatever it was, my mind was low on something at the moment. All I felt was isolation and stress and inability. What a crappy thing to do to me on a Friday afternoon.

Despite the airtight blinds my room was still lit by an artificial sun from an artificial world. The computer screen shone brightly like a full moon.

I turned away from it. Not because of the light but because of what was displayed on it. A web page with a simple photo in the corner. A girl posing, smiling, staring at me through the lens. She wore an earthy green summer dress with a small print and her hair poured down her forehead like a waterfall. So natural and serene like the day outside. So I fought the urge to look at either.

My dog barked at all the traffic outside our house despite my parents and brother yelling at him to stop. Two wrongs trying to make a right. I turned up my music to drown out the noise from all of them.

All this music and I don't even want to hear any of it, I thought to myself as I scanned my Ipod for any sort of relief from the circus going on around me. I settled on Death Cab cause even when I didn't want to listen to them I always could.

"...I need you so much closer, I need you so much closer..." And I fell asleep.


Hours later I awoke to darkness and silence and shot my digital clock a look.

8:42 PM it informed me.

Satisfied that I had defeated the terrible day, I sat up and cracked the excess of sleep out of my spine. Finally leaving my matress I transferred my body to the chair in front of the sleeping computer. It sighed to life with a whirr and a couple robotic tics. And all it once her image came to me like a Vietnam flashback in a bad eighties movie. I quickly refreshed the browser window and erased her for the time being.

Then I heard the familiar bloop of a new iChat window and stared at the electronic translation of a thought in type.

-Hey Therrrrre

It was her. Adele Lopez, the girl from my screen, the image from my flashback, the girl manifest as a Friday afternoon was suddenly posing a common colloquialism to me. I wanted to respond and at the same time not.

Over the past week I had finally been resolved to let her go and it seemed fate dealt me a cruel hand.

-Hi Adele, how have you been

Then nothing. For three minutes I watched the empty speech box and imagined my conversation buried somewhere in six or ten other ones she was having with people who deserved her attention. All the guys I'd seen compliment her on Myspace. All the boys who posed so close to her in party pictures. And me staring at an empty speech box.

My heart sunk a bit. I had no confidence in myself and I knew it. I resigned to walk away from the computer with a little dignity and fix myself something to eat.

As I reached the frame of my door a second bloop sounded and I paused in stride. Staring down at my feet and the carpet, I made a decision. I turned around and took a seat in front of the screen to read the response.

-Sorry, I had a phone call and I didn't want to be distracted

I wasn't sure what that meant. Well, I understood what it said, but what was she really telling me? Was the phone a distraction or me? Did she actually care enough about this conversation to give me the courtesy of undivided attention? As was sometimes the problem with instant messaging, words could never give the whole story and I had a bad habit of analyzing intent in the most innocent of statements. Especially when I was already looking for something.

-Oh that's fine, I didn't even notice, I said playing off the small panic attack I had at the sight of her name.

I was strangely good at speaking over instant message. I was able to think about what I said and maximized my personality by joking almost constantly. It must have been a bit like conversing with a Vaudevillian comic.

But the longer it went on, the brighter I became. Adele was seemingly happy to play back and forth with me. Suddenly my terrible Friday might be salvaged. Then she surprised me.

-Hey Evan, I gotta go now because I've got to get ready to hang out with some friends, but I wanted to say you are welcome to come along if you want

If I had a panic attack because of what she said before, this threw my heart into a full blown conniption of conflicting, overloaded thoughts. Of course I wanted to say yes. So I quickly got that out of the way.

- Sure that'd be fun. Where are you going?

She named off some bar I'd never heard of but it didn't matter. She could have named The Palms in Las Vegas and I would have been at the airport buying a ticket in the best D-Bag Diesel Jeans, striped button shirt and leather Florsheim shoes I could find on the way.

-Just come over to my house, my friends are driving

I couldn't believe it was this easy. My personality had never paid off before and I was on the cusp of strange territory. I still had no confidence but at least my mind was too distracted to realize that this fortunate turn of events was being wasted on me.

And I rushed out the door to take a shower, smiling that I wouldn't have to spend ALL my Spring days in self-imposed exile.