One Percent

I remember you, so clearly. How you knew, without a doubt, what coursed and lived in my head.

In summer it was so simple. I could get in a car and forget I existed for the day. I could be just a drifting dot of shiny black hair, barely breaking the surface of the neighborhood pool and you would float blithely with me. It wasn't hard to imagine that our lives would remain this way, unbroken lines twining around in hopeless loops, as tangled and sedentary as the unused hose in the back yard, hidden as it was in a bed of overgrown weeds. Yet the facts of our lives cascaded down in increments and I knew (just as you did) that the lines were diverging, fracturing by the stop sign on your street I've blown by a hundred times-uncaring, undaunted, daft.

We both moved away. I'm here in Boston, working as best as I can and fingering all these memories shored up in my head of us, the slow, gradual way in which I came to be your friend and the fast, heady rush of our epic final year.

I wonder what's changed, in these months, in the months still to come. I wonder a lot about these things. I think ahead to coming home, to how ordinary and bucolic Tennessee will feel to me now that I've been here, in Boston's coruscating fringe. 

So what if my life isn't grand? If there's anything that reading all these memoirs has taught me it's this: No lives are. You can be Earnest freaking Hemingway and still have a boring life 99% of the time.

It's that 1% though that you live for, that you keep coming back too when the desultory, the mundane, engulfs you. It's that 1% that you look back on without aid from photo albums or Facebook threads, because that image you have in your head defies all physical remnants of that sort.

I'll keep looking I guess, waiting for my life be worthy of  remembering... holding out for that one percent chance.