Chapter 16

She volunteered to take me home. The same bright blue eyes, the bluest I’ve ever seen. The same long, curly blonde hair.

The night had been an interesting one. A huge but unexpected hoard of people had crowded the small kitchen, eating marinated walnuts and candied pumpkin. Those of us that felt like outcasts would periodically retreat to one of the other rooms – the living room, with its musical instruments, or the family room, removed from the kitchen by a banister and just a few stairs.

When I walked in her house that night, I had no idea if she would be there. I heard her voice up the stairs, and I hurriedly thrust the cupcakes I bore into someone else’s surprised hands, sprinting up to meet her. She was just as beautiful as I remembered her. She just emits light. A walking prism; rainbows bouncing off of every curl, out of every fleck in her eyes. Her skin has a quality about it; a quality that evokes thoughts of mythical creatures, combinations of divine women and even more divine creatures. Pale, but not colorless. It shimmers like precious metal; if the women that surround her are counterfeits of the real thing, she is the diamond. When placed next to something else inferior, the difference is immediately apparent.

We have an eternal friendship, she tells me.

Is that why we can separate physically but still stay connected somehow?

I spent quality time alone, reliving memories from that strange land. Memories that brought joy and laughter. Memories that stung. Memories that made me want to recoil from my own mind.

He was there. Standing in the corner, quiet as always. He is one of the few that knows of that day; that saw me in the extremity of human suffering. In fact, he never saw me in anything but the extremity of human suffering. I spent the night avoiding him. What do you say to someone who saw you beg for death?

What can you say to God?

It’s like she sees me for what I can become, rather than the person I am right now. I hold you on a pedestal so high, that nothing you could say or do could make you fall, she told me. So energetic as she stepped side to side, trotting like a horse about to receive fresh oats after a long day’s work.

We paused in front of my house. She was telling me of books she has read. It was then that I realized.

Tonight would never have happened had I not served a mission.

Memories are made, I think, by a combination of many factors. Location. Season. People. Time. Food. Smells. The list could go on and on.

This particular recipe had a key ingredient: me.

I met Kelia in the MTC. She and Anna met that weekend in Rexburg. Early October; still warm enough to leave our jackets packed away in boxes, waiting to air their heavy, soiled selves and dominate our tired shoulders for the many months of winter to come. It was one of the last days of freedom. We went to the local gas station and traded a few quarters for some Mexican coca-cola. She showed me her secret place; the tree like a saddle, overlooking the river. It flowed slowly there. Like her thoughts. I pictured her there, mourning the many different losses that have characterized her life so far.

Ashley. The beautiful farm girl whose tragic accident darkened a time that should have been lighthearted. I see pictures of old friends, drinking and frolicking in the naïve frivolity of young adulthood. Anna never got that opportunity.

Ben. The boy that waited a year and a half, writing consistently if sparingly, only to choose someone else when she came home. Their final goodbye so bittersweet. I wonder if she sat just there, watching the water pass by. Slowly. I wonder what she felt. If she felt the unfairness of it all; how can one life be filled with so much loss?

When she drove to Malad, her car broke down. I imagined her telling me this in person, but we were separated by over two hundred miles. She left the car by the freeway underpass, and began walking towards the field of wildflowers. I wonder if she knows how different that makes her. She plucked the flowers, gathering them in her small, flexible hands. She could bend the fingers backwards, touching her wrist with the delicate fingernails. Pink like rose petals.

That weekend, the three of us got into a car. Spontaneous. Full of life. We just drove over the Idaho plains, golden in the final stages of the harvest. We came to an overpass that bridged a river. Anna pulled the car to the side of the highway, that gleam in her eye. The same gleam she had in her eye when she applied red dye to my hair in that tiny bathroom. The gleam that I saw when I caught her eye in a mirror in the salon by chulogni hraprak, depi tigran mets, as heavy eyebrowed Armenians pulled at our hair, brushing it and styling it in the late 90s style they still use there. It means so many things at once: adventure, liveliness, importance; as if the moment we are about to enter, the memory we are about to create will define her. Something to hide from the grandchildren, unless they display the spunk necessary to appreciate it.

Let’s go swimming,

We thought about it. But then our clothes would be wet. They would get Anna’s car wet. It would be cold.

She started the car again.

We just need to buy some underwear.

It’s that spirit that makes her different. To be honest, it’s so many things. But this is one of the major ones. You don’t give up the chance to make memories just because a small obstacle threatens your path. You move it. You jump over it. You go around. Even if the obstacle is a mountain – get a shovel and start moving it.

For verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

Sometimes, she told me, having faith to move a mountain means the faith to get a shovel and start moving it.

We ended up in some tiny Idaho town; so small it didn’t have a grocery store. We wandered into the only shop with a sign of life in it, realizing as we entered that it was a second-hand store. We had come with the intention of asking where to find a wal-mart. While I questioned the middle-aged woman, Anna and Kelia wandered to the back of the store, examining the old prom dresses and lingerie. Skeletons of important nights gone by. Someone’s hopes and dreams were realized or ruined in those clothes. Or out of them…. Now they were discarded, sloughed as a snake’s skin. Left behind as tattered ruins of a colorful past. Haphazardly arranged on cheap plastic hangers for strangers to handle, judge, and leave behind. Just as we handle, judge, and abandon our memories.

We walked out of the store a few moments later, carrying our booty. Anna, a black, slinky, lacy number in her hand. Kelia chose red velour. I somehow ended up with a floor-length white, gauzy, transparent negligee. We drove back to the bridge, and changed in the car. We waited for all the trucks to pass, and snuck down the side of the hill. We headed upstream, hair tumbling over bare shoulders and bare feet stumbling over the river rocks that had been left behind as the water level fell. Global warming, everyone tells me.

The only evidences we have of that moment are the pictures of our shadows, posing in the autumn light, the negligees, and the images etched in our minds. Of Kelia laughing as she ventured into the rapid stream. Of my nightgown becoming immediately see through as soon as it came in contact with water. Of Anna, barely submerging her toe before declaring it too cold. As we sat on the rocks, mermaids with satin tails, sunning ourselves, a group of boys approached. We clutched at ourselves as they asked if we knew where the rope swing was. NO! A chorus of sirens. Tempting from the rocks.

The magic of the memory lived on as we crawled into the car, grasping our sides from laughing and clutching for the clothes we had so rapidly shoved into plastic crevices. As we drove and grew nearer and nearer to Rexburg, we seemed to be driving from myth back into reality. From legend into life.

It all started there. From there they grew into friends, then sisters. Now they are connected by the same strings which connect me to them. The twine of regret, guilt, memory, joy, tears, comfort. Jewels in the tapestry of life, trapped by our circumstances, but our brilliance not dimmed by them. Kelia is a diamond. Light and prisms all through. She keeps none of her beauty for herself; she just receives and gives back, making the gift more beautiful as it passes through her. Anna, a pearl. She is opaque, hard to discern. Looking at her is like looking at eternity. The harder you stare, the less you can see. She only shows herself as she chooses. She is uncommon, from obscure origins. Formed from pain – her own, and that of others. Brilliant but not blinding. You only see what she really is if you invest the time. And then there’s me. I don’t know what jewel to compare myself to. Probably an opal. Not everyone likes them, but those that do find that their faults are what make them beautiful. Strings of purple, green and blue that make each opal unique.

That night was made by location. By food. By people. Forged from the pain of my past, connected by the mythology of the present. Cemented by our hope of the future.