A Friendship -

In winter Chicago smells of exhaust and cold; the first day of school has this smell of freshly sharpened pencils and stale classrooms; the bathroom has a smell of ‘Brute’ cologne and stale cigarettes. Everything in my life leaves a small impression in my memory – a small impression that will linger in my mind for years to follow. This summer left a new impression on me: As I recall its events I will always feel a warmth and closeness inside that follows with a scent of ‘Sensual Amber’ body spray and the sound of loud music blaring in my head. Our friendship was reunited in spring after about a six-month separation and every month we clung to each other more and more, knowing another separation rested on the horizon.

AFI’s “Prelude 12/21” rang as a text message was delivered to my cell phone. It’s Kami – she wants to know if I want to hang out when she gets out of work at 6 p.m. She came to my house around 7 p.m. and we just barely drove to Subway to get some dinner. I say ‘just barely’ because her car doesn’t like going where we want it to; the RPM’s would drop significantly low and the engine would just rev rather than speed up so that we would just barely make it to where we had to go before it conked out for a few hours.

We enjoyed our sandwiches which were over-stuffed with vegetables that we both knew would add those extra few calories that we were trying to hard to avoid. Before hanging out with her, I never added anything to my subs but she made me want to try new things and as small as adding olives to my usually BLT sub is, it was a big deal for me. Soon enough she had me adding tomato and olives and oils to all my sandwiches. Kami and I had the uncanny ability to influence one another without the slightest intention of doing so. I, to her displeasure I am sure, somehow managed to sway her to be just a bit more high-maintenance than her usual self. Now, just as I often do, she orders her food with a few things ‘on the side’ as opposed to on the sandwich and she finds herself criticizing restaurant services now more than ever.

As the day came closer and closer we seemed to spend more time together. To the extreme annoyance of many around us, Kami and I were inseparable. In our most extreme exhaustion we would call one another up to get together. Everyday it seemed we would lay-out yet another creative endeavor for us to accomplish before I was to leave for school. Our last, and most memorable, endeavor was to make a photo-album of our pictures telling the story of our friendship. We already had over 300 photos of her from the days when I fancied myself a photographer and her, a model. We had probably two of me and about fifteen of us together. We had a long way to go to get to our goal of 150 but we did it. Almost everyday when we got together we would snap pictures.

For a few days we aimed to get pictures of us in front of the most significant places we went to in the summer (Denny’s, Dominick’s, Panda Express, Xactek, etc) but our time was, to say in the least, limited. We also wanted to get pictures of us with every person we spent time with in the summer but that proved to be an even more impossible thing as people would only see us when it was convenient for them.

The photos were all taken and I was set to leave the following day. She came to my house that morning and we ran errands the entire day in the 90 degree heat. We went to Panda Express to get some food and each ate one egg roll too much which pushed us both past full and into our “going-to-keel-over-and-die-of-fullness” phase. From there we headed to the mall to find a photo booth where we could take pictures. To our annoyance Woodfield Mall did not have one so we drove over to Stratford where we walked around the mall for almost an hour before giving up and then realizing as we were leaving that it was under the door we entered from.

After taking our pictures we headed to Wal-Mart to get our 150 pictures developed but the photo lines were long and the machines were running slow so with only 2 hours left of the store being open we began to panic. Both of us were getting to our breaking point. It was a mixture of emotions in knowing that it was our last night together and not being able to get what to needed to do done that we sort-of fell into an emo mood.

Thankfully Walgreens came to our rescue and was able to develop all of the images within 2 hours – so as we were waiting for them to finish we walked across the street to McDonald’s. Neither of us was very hungry but with no other ideas of what to do and both of us in sad moods, we settled on eating. While there we spoke of our friends who refused to hang out with us before I left. We were hurt – simple as that.

Finally, our pictures were done from Walgreens. We headed back to my house where we finished bringing my belongings down to my sisters car in the rain before sitting in the living room and laying our all the pictures into the photo albums together. It was hard and we both wanted to cry many times as we looked at the images that told the story of our friendship – a friendship we knew would again be challenged as we both went our own ways.

With us both feeling down trodden and emotional and with the photo albums finished we went over to Denny’s where we sat enjoyed a huge sundae as we wrote captions and watching the rain come down harder and harder. The clock reading 2 a.m. we decided to split; each of us go home and face the coming day separately. She drove me home and we both stood in the rain with tears on our face, only a hug to signify everything. Kami drove away.