Dear Marlon

Dear Marlon,

I was thinking about you today. Can you believe it has been over thirty years since we walked the halls of Leesville High School together, passing notes and knowing looks in homeroom and the class we shared? How would I have survived Trigonometry without you? I wonder if we seemed unlikely friends to outsiders, but it was just easy. We slid into friendship without even noticing. I think it was you that made it so.

I tried searching for you on Facebook.

I know. I know. Facebook is for old people, or at least that’s what my children say. But I guess that is what I am now. Old. It’s funny. I still feel like I’m eighteen most of the time, though the mirror gives me away. Wrinkles and children always hold you to the truth. But I suppose then that you are old too. At least I hope you are. I couldn’t find you.

I am in touch with John. He is still in Louisiana. Maybe you know that. You were such good friends in high school and yet you let me vent about him all the time. High school romances. Patiently you doled out advice, never frustrated. And when he dated someone else shortly after me, you are the one that took me to our senior party so I wouldn’t be alone. I can’t remember if I thanked you for that. I hope I did.

You picked me up in your 1991 Mitsubishi Eclipse and opened the door for me. We listened to the radio play and rode with the windows rolled down just enough that we had to raise our voices to hear each other speak. You were mad at him, for me. And I wondered why I ever liked him when there was you beside me the whole time. But there is something you don’t know. Something I couldn’t say, after you picked me up, introducing yourself to my parents with a gentlemanly promise to bring me back on time. That family friend leaning close, asking my father as we left, “Are you really going to let her go out with a Black boy?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” my father replied.

But you dealt with that sort of thing all the time, I imagine. I just didn’t notice, and you never said. I hope it wasn’t because you didn’t think I would believe you. I would have.

I always believed you.

There was a rumor that you liked a girl in our class the year before we graduated and that her father put a burning cross in your front yard. I didn’t know her father, but I felt hatred for him. I never asked you about it, though. Should I have? Would that have made me a better friend or just a nosy one? Would it have helped dampen the message of that cross?

I read something not too long ago about a couple in South Carolina whose neighbors were bent with hatred and a need to spread it. A picture of a large burning cross was plastered across the top of the article with the heading ‘We were speechless’: Cross burning in Conroy has couple begging for change. Oddly enough, it was the word speechless that stood out to me most because so often that is how I feel as I see these things in the news. I’m shocked and heartbroken, yes. Mostly, though, I’m speechless. But being speechless doesn’t do anything, does it? Like this couple, we can’t stop there. We need to move past it and beg for change.

Did I ever tell you about my first day of school at Leesville High? It was so muggy as I walked up the steps of the school bus that morning. Our driver was named Hunt. He was a large man with an unkempt beard, bored brown eyes and a mouth that neither frowned nor smiled. I liked him, though. He felt safe and familiar, never rattled or bothered by the hormone-induced woes or drama we dragged into his life twice each school day. In fact, I’m not certain I ever heard him speak. He got us to and from school without fail, and that is what mattered.

 Scanning the bus that morning, I looked nervously for a welcoming face and found one. Sitting down, I introduced myself and we ended up chatting nonstop for the rest of the ride. It was Stephanie. You remember her, don’t you? We were stuck like glue until graduation three years later. She’s a singer now, in New York. She never got married or had children. Too busy. She seems happy.

I wish I remembered when you and I met. It is interesting the things we can recall and the things we can’t. When I would forget something as a child my mother would jokingly say, “It must not have been that important.” That was always comforting, the idea that I would certainly remember something if it were important, and the implication that if I didn’t, it was because it wasn't. But the older I get, the more I see that is not true at all. We hold onto things that don’t matter and forget things that do. Our memories fall jaded and picky, often eluding us when we need them most. I should have paid more attention.

But I do remember the first time I walked through those doors into the long hallway that stretched the length of the school we would share, you and me. I remember the heaviness of it. I don’t know how to explain it, but I could feel the weight of it that morning and every morning after. It was the two-headed monster I had only read about in books, in black and white before me, very much alive and well. The line of Black students down one side of the hall and the line of white students across from them, each laughing and unaware that anything was amiss. Could they not see it? The invisible chalk line they had drawn to separate themselves from one another? I longed to walk down the middle and scuff it away.

As I look back at my childhood, I see it was different than yours. Soldiers often marry people they meet in the countries where they are stationed. Growing up as an army brat in Germany, many of my friends’ families were interracial and intercultural. I loved learning about their traditions and ways of perceiving the world. It made life richer. Race was not a cause for separation. We avoided assumptions and, instead, drew close. Separated from our families by an ocean, we became family.

My father used to say, “When you are in a fox hole it doesn’t matter the color of the soldier beside you.” I know he was speaking of Vietnam and how it changed the way he saw people, but I think we are still at war. Don’t you? And so often we forget we are not each other’s enemy. We are each just the other soldier in the fox hole.

But I was no longer in Germany that day. I was in Louisiana staring down a hallway, trying desperately to swallow the sick feeling that kept bubbling up; trying to push it down the way you gulp medicine as a child, chasing it with juice to cover up the bad taste.

My daughter and I were looking through my old yearbook recently. She is going into ninth grade next year. Can you believe it? I showed her all the clubs I was a part of our senior year and the pictures of friends, but she grew bored with my stories and my walk down memory lane, so I finished it alone. I suppose I was walking slow, but there was just so much to see. I meandered through all the notes and signatures among the pages, though I struggled a bit when I found the page you signed. It made me smile the same way it did the first time I read it, but it also made me sad.

Dear Amy,

I’m amazed! How did we build such a close relationship? We may have built a life-long friendship by only sharing one class together. That’s something to think about. I’ve had problems with girls, friends, and teachers alike and you’ve been there through it all. I’m glad you were there. Where would I be without you? What is going to happen after high school?

Your place in my heart can’t be replaced. I admire you so much and I’ve never met anyone like you. It would be my pleasure to present others with the kindness you presented towards me. I’ll never forget the memories of you that I hold today. Should our friendship hold steady throughout time, I wish it to be as close as it is today, May 8, 1991. I love you!

Friends for life,

Marlon

Time has a way of moving on and change comes right along with it. Our friendship slipped away as quickly as it came, but I never forgot you. I hope you went on to fulfill the dreams you shared with me when we were young and that you have lived a life very different from the one you started. I pray you’ve been recognized for the person you are inside and surrounded by people who care about you the way we used to care about each other. People who sit in the fox hole with you and fight with you against that two-headed monster still prowling around. People who are not speechless, who are begging for change. You deserved that much.

Friends for life,

Amy