(polaroid sx-70 / 600 film)

I remember the flag sellers at the edge of my small northern town so very long ago when I was an angry mascara fringe over a thick line of black khol and now they are back at the end of a long street lined with towering elm trees, here on the fringe of my daisy soaked life. 

The teenage boys* that litter my life tell me how cool the flags are, look at that one there with the marijuana leaf like a maple leaf and a rock star’s face buried beneath the ground next to a swashbuckling pirate symbol of a velvet elvis crouched beside smoking cigar dogs.  And I stare with a faint roll of revulsion in my stomach and am suddenly transported back to my version of the eighties, those torn black jeans and yellow stained fingers of freedom filled angst.

And as I pull out my polaroid and hold my breath before the billowing wind forces my click, I remember the first apartment I ever had in a three story walk up with a balcony overlooking a dandelion field of forgotten memories.  I was driving like a maniac through town as anger at my parents spilled out of the exhaust dropping oil slick thoughts across the pavement and I saw you walking head down.  I didn’t know you but your boyfriend had tried to pick me up in the bar over a rum and coke breath smile on more than one occasion and so on impulse I stopped and asked you if you needed a ride.  You smiled gratefully and hopped in to escape the reddened cheeks of a cold wind.  Within 5 minutes of talking, blowing smoke rings of wistful longing, you expressed that you and he and broken up and I impulsively asked you to be my roommate.  An hour later we secured an apartment and I went home to break up with my parents after stopping to buy a rock n roll flag for my new bedroom window.

You were older and so much cooler with your swinging black bobbed hair and bright lipstick that left markings on the mismatched coffee mugs and ends of stubbed out cigarettes.  I had a child’s bed with white drawers underneath my squished up mattress as you slept with dark haired boys on a rolling waved water bed.  We happily tacked artwork on the walls and threw after hours parties, black sabbath pounding out of big black speakers as laughter rolled out onto the balcony.  We snorted life up our young noses and became disgusted with the anger of poverty, the lies of the machine.  

The last time I saw you, your rust colour haired children were filled with laughter and raced through the trailer court with smudgy smiles as their freckles winked out playfully.  I was home on a visit from the big city where I was living my university life and in my uncertainty, I played the part of pretension sitting there in my bright red hair and bright red lips, showing off far too much of black clad legs under a lime green short skirt.  You were bravely beautiful still and filled with hope and I was still running, always running.  I ran from that apartment of ours straight into a burned out trailer court of hopelessness as I dug through shag rugs for my next fix and I ran from the pain of all that into an empty student apartment and classrooms filled with words that felt too high up for me to reach with any confidence.  It was easy for me to look down on your trailer court life because I had escaped that life without realizing it was the life I had created so much differently than you had.  Your trailer was clean and beautifully filled with the bright colour of children’s artwork and shiny yellow flowers of love but I didn’t realize because I was too fixated on running from the poverty that crawled up and embedded itself in my forever dirty fingernails. 

I haven’t thought of you in forever but in a rush, your smile and heart came back to me as the flags billowed up in the wind.  I thought of you and of me and how easy it was to be impulsive and free even as we felt so weary and old.  I thought about how easy you opened yourself up to a friendship with a stranger who flirted too much over rum and coke’s easy smile and suddenly I find myself missing you and missing that version of me that I worked so hard to escape.

 ~~~

*I am surrounded by teenage boys who romanticize the eighties as some mythical time when everything was real and cool and they think I was so lucky to have been young then.  And I laugh and laugh and laugh some more.