The thing that first struck me was your hair. It was cropped short—boy short—except for two long tendrils dangling at the front. You were standing with Nina and I mistook you for a visiting friend from Germany, with those blonde strands, blue eyes, and tough jawline. I stood there, in my carefully selected back-to-school outfit, and I puzzled quietly at your hair. We all wore ours long, or shoulder-length, tumbling down backs towards casually exposed underwear. Not that my hair tumbled; it hung limp and unruly, and I could never run my fingers through it the way other girls did, sweeping it back and allowing it to fall coquettishly over one eye. But long it was, and down I wore it, a bid for inclusion.

           

But you weren't playing our game. Your underwear remained unexposed, and your hair tumbled only as a thin, slicing frame for your symmetrical face, which was as defined as sculpted stone. Such an odd specimen you were, and you shimmered with a still-lake mystery that commanded everyone's attention. I was a girl in a new outfit, trying to fit in with an awkward posture and a fixed smile smeared over eager stammers. Your otherworldliness was unsettling. My memory presents you as the exiled princess of a distant, dusty planet in a 50s B-movie—an impression now a gift to my past self, for I lacked the ability then to express my awe and fear of your alien light at the time.

 

You became hot shit real fast; people fell for your sullen, knowing beauty that would ripple, aloof and indefinable, and collapse suddenly into wrinkled-nosed giggles. You poured yourself into our lives but were more mysterious than dark matter, prancing, laughing, teasing, glowing, and then far away, with eyes that had already seen so much glazing over, your mind whirring and spinning, face unreadable and still as polished marble.

 

And behind that face lived a mind that cracked open our concepts of intelligence like walnuts. It seemed as though not an unoriginal or inarticulate thought could pass your lips, and the wild and intricate workings of your brain sent conversations skidding, thrown violently and thrillingly off-road. You plotted your own course and we, tantalized, ventured in your wake into your strange landscapes, adapting ourselves to better fit, though we remained mere clumsy imposters. We were high on you, liberated from our blinkered adolescent inertia, and exhilarated. You were sillier and smarter and sadder than all of us, and I wanted to be all of those things as well.

 

I can't recall the first time we interacted, but I do remember the intense embarrassment of talking to you, my insignificance exposed, my tongue feeling thick with the stupid things I’d say. My blinking awe slowly eased, but it seemed laughable that we would ever share anything more than fleeting moments at school. Yet it was during one of those moments that my tension melted and a friendship emerged.

 

We were standing by the school wall during break, and you were wearing black lace gloves (I had had a pair once that was similar, and in that moment I lamented that I had gotten rid of them). We saw a small spider skirting like breath across that grimy outer wall, and mid-conversation, without warning, you reached out your gloved hand and you picked it up. It fluttered across your black gloves and I felt, then, pieces of me unfurl and whip back in slow motion like seaweed sent waving by the force of a passing current.

 

That’s the moment my mind has marked as the start of our friendship, of my being inextricably bound to you, of a new world opening up.

 

This was a world in which we walked the streets of old Nice at night, tequila and pencils in hand, drunkenly drawing and writing poetry on alleyway walls; darted about in torrential rain, arms raised in exultation to the heavy sky; leaned against chain-link fences sharing things we’d written; dressed up in mismatched clothes and sat under breath-clouded stars; shared books and jokes and adventures and ideas. The world in which you were my friend was one that rose to meet me in sharp focus, as though before then I’d been looking through maladjusted binoculars.

 

You came down a little off the pedestal once we were friends, but my admiration didn't abate all that much, and I could never entirely shed the feeling that by becoming your friend, I had somehow been chosen, though perhaps that was more out of dislike for myself than awe of you. Either way, can you really blame me? I was young in so many ways, shaken from the conservative shell of my childhood a few years earlier, and still struggling in a school I didn't know how to keep up with. I was awkward and naive, fashioned from wet clay, abandoned by the artist before I had found shape, matched by equally unformed interests and opinions; uncertain, unkissed, unaware of the depths of my own unhappiness, waiting in a blank-walled room for something to happen. Then you came along and furnished my world with a bounty of thoughts and sights and sounds: Pink Floyd, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, King Crimson, Led Zepellin and Tom Waits! Pulp Fiction and Labyrinth and Juliet of the Spirits, Kurosawa and Svankmejer! We shared the vodka that made me drunk-vomit for the first time; you gave me magic mushrooms; you put Steppenwolf and Siddhartha into my hands; you asked me what I thought love was; you showed me how to make rosemary mashed potatoes; you read my terrible, angst-ridden poetry with sage affection.

 

Try as I might, it’s hard not to question what I gave you in our friendship, or, rather, what you were able to extract. You loved me, I know, but not in the same way I loved you. What I would give to see me back then through your eyes, though maybe even now it would redden my cheeks with embarrassment.

 

What did you think as you watched me try to emulate your bruised wisdom, your rage, your popping popcorn brain, coming up short with a pout and inarticulate sorrow? What did you think as I lied to you? For I lied and lied and lied to you; drawing closer to you also meant your presence loomed greater, like a giant planet harnessing the orbit of a small moon, and I wanted so desperately to appear larger. Wrapped up in the dull concerns of adolescence, I thought I could earn your approval through fake anecdotes and wild fabrications, unaware than I already had it, unaware that you knew I lied and you loved me anyway. You opted not to see what I tried to conceal, but what my fabrications revealed. You saw more of me than I realized and loved the girl I tried to hide. I came to understand that, but I still don’t know what exactly you saw in me. Though I suppose my question has evolved. Maybe now the question is how do you remember me?

Here is what I remember of you: the curve of the tattoo on your tanned shoulder blade, bisected by the strap of your tank top; the stern contemplation of your face as you lifted your gaze from your sketchbook, headphones a clunky crown upon your head; the sudden laugh of delight as you lay back on the grass and watched a squirrel bound across the park; your curiously straight blonde eyelashes, like those of a camel; that time you reached up to a chandelier, unhooked two enormous crystals, and looped them through your ears; the skin stretching around your lip piercing as you grinned, body shaking with silent convulsions at a joke I’d made; the tilt of your wide chin framed by a hoodie, exhaling clouds of cold air and cigarette smoke; the weird things you had drawn all over your bathroom with crayons and lipstick; the stories you told, already then enough to fill several books; your funny crushes on random people (Anthony! Magnus!- whom we followed home giggling one warm, lazy afternoon); and the times when you would withdraw to an unknown place where no one and nothing could reach you. I felt left behind, those times, and anxiously alone—and I imagine it was those times when you felt the most alone as well. I was your friend, but not your peer. I don't think any of us were.

 

Even so, while you could have remained on the fringes of our lives, aloof and superior, you connected without condescension, without impatience. We sat on the floor of the locker room one day, skipping class to stay in conversation, cross-legged and facing one another as though engaged in séance. Your back, as usual, was impossibly straight and you looked at me evenly, like a sphinx. I was sad, and your eyes were soft with concern and a sincerity that bore holes into my bloated misery. It didn't matter than you had already scaled a spectrum of pain, intimacy, hedonism, rebellious euphoria, and punishment that made the pain I knew seem small. You listened, and folded me into your compassion. You were rarely affectionate, but your empathy was a new kind of affection for me, and I collapsed into it, exhausted.

 

I was still too young and foolish to learn from that day and so many other days. I remained too scared to be genuine, too selfish to be empathetic, too inexperienced to offer much of substance to anyone else. I stayed submerged in uncertainty and insecurity and didn’t find my way to the surface for breath for quite some years. Your gift to me was an oxygen tank that you dove down to me like a submarine angel.

           

So. Diver, sphinx, extraterrestrial princess… You were all these and more to me, but the metaphors I use to depict you are both inadequate and laughingly overwrought. They neither explain the intensity of your effect, nor do justice to what you were away from my wondering gaze: a flawed, bruised, hopeful young girl figuring out how to grow up like the rest of us. The passing of time allows me now to sweep aside that gauzy veil from behind which I used to consider you. Yet there’s a ghost of me, nestled somewhere in my core, that is kept company by the ghost of what you were to me. Messy, flesh-and-bones, and human you may be, but those two little specters haunt me still.