D.M.

She seems excited when I call. She tells me that it is really good to hear my voice again. She laughs when I ask how “Big Time senior year” is transpiring. She is older and she is telling you things. She is telling me that she is staying out late on weekend nights. She is telling me about friends who have their own apartment near main street and how she is visiting them and drinking beer.  She is telling me that she is preparing for speech in a couple of weeks.  She is going through a serious life-altering Dostoevsky. She says its almost inevitable once you have read Notes From the Underground and Native Son, which she encourages you to do right away since it isn’t on DIST 150 tried to unsuccessfully ban Native son a few years back when a cool speech teacher at Woodruff tried to teach it in his advance English class.  She is telling you about poetry. She tells you that she has a leather notebook and writes a poem a day. She stressed ‘free verse.’ She tells you about Sylvia Plath. She states that after she read Daddy she thinks that she was Sylvia Plath in a prior life. She says that she has always had a rather unfounded phobia when it comes to gas stoves.

She is telling you things. She surprises you by yelling out your name and stating that it is good to hear your voice.  It has been almost six weeks since the last you spoke.

She talks about Politics. She is pro-Clinton. She is Pro-change. She is pro-choice even though she says she shouldn’t wish an abortion on her maid of honor even if she slept with her incumbent husband the night before the big day and was a bitch. She seems to talk from experience. She says that 12 years of the Reganomic maxi-pad that has been sopping up the financial fertility of our nation dry. You try to tell her that Ronald Reagan was elected when you were three and  along with Bush  are the only president you ever seeing in the wooden square in the center of the living room where occasionally afternoon programing of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and the Polka-dot door gets interrupted by some talk show which sounds like a law firm interview the president about some conflict in either Iran or some country named Contra  She tells you that, even though she can’t officially vote until Dec and misses election she can't wait to vote. She calls voting losing her virginity behind a blue curtain. She states that she is not jingoistic but if you choose not to vote and all you do is bitch all the time you should move to a third world country where you have to wear a veil and deny you toilet paper and come back and show some  fucking gratitude.

She uses the word fuck.

She talks about music she has been listening to. She talks about how music is changing. She says that she still has the tape-recorder in her car scooters off on long-country drives past Elmwood listening to Concrete Blond. She uses the word Alternative. 

She is feeding you ideas. 

She is feeding you belief systems 

  She is telling your body where to  go.

  

Dawn tells me that she has been hanging out with people who are older. She is stating that the majority of her friends graduated three years ago.

She says that she doesn’t talk to Quinn anymore because he’s a conservative monkeycock. 

She’s talk the whole entire time in a current of stream of conscious thought. It sounds as if she needed to vent  even though she is polite and asks you how you are doing. You want to tell her about High school, how you less like a nautical entity with fins plopped in a rather large anonymous pet store tank and more like cadaver, face down, like Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks.  You want to tell her all about your year. You want to tell her about how complete you felt last summer. You .want to tell her about how you run every day in hopes of breaking the FROSH record. You want to tell her sitting behind Angelina Lighthouse in Cool Joe Thomas’ classroom. You want to tell her about the semi-date you went on last Friday with a girl from Limestone who is the most beautiful creature you have ever seen

You make a conscious choice not to bring up the name of your one friend she deems misogynistic and disgusting. 

She says the  speech team purportedly lives in Monical's PIZZA in Westlake because they have infinite coffee refills and kick ass salad and don’t car if you lounge around all night and smoke.

“You smoke?”

Dawn Michelle says yeah, but only during speech season because it stresses her out, with school and all.

I am in awe. I miss our intellectually tete-a-tete. I miss our long conversation last summer about music and art. I miss the way that she was always three years older yet never treated me like a freshman.

I don't want to tell her goodbye.