I hadn’t heard from Catherine since a short while we first (and last) met. It’s not that we didn’t wanted to stay in touch – she fiercely insisted on it, - but neither of us quite found the time for it. I wrote her emails for the first couple of months and congratulated her for her birthday, but after her forgetting mine, the messages slowly died out until this morning.
We had nothing in common when we met in Oklahoma but the fact that we were both guests in the house and that neither of us quite knew what that meant. She was going to stay a while, I was told, but I was there briefly, so even that similarity seemed to mean little when I first heard her name being introduced. And there was no immediate effect her presence caused upon me although I was seventeen at the time and highly impressed by young women. Perhaps it was the fact that she was just about ten years older than me, or that she wasn’t beautiful in the typical sense of the word, not what I would describe as beautiful anyway, that I didn’t notice her right away.
Catherine Snow – another name on the list of people I was supposed to know.
The house where we stayed in Oklahoma was fairly big, much bigger than my own, and while I was constantly on alert of not doing something wrong or not breaking something by accident, despite that I’d been told that that was Catherine’s first visit there, she acted with no such prejudices; she simply owned the house. Who she was staying there with I couldn’t quite find out. I was invited there on an exchange project, and I admitted I knew no one. She didn’t seem to know anyone either, but I couldn’t quite picture an exchange program for adults.
Damn! That’s how I viewed her then!
I sometimes wish I knew what she thought of me on those first couple of days before we started taking our walks around the city. Later, when we strolled, she told me how it would be a pity traveling all the way there and not getting to know the place, as well as she told me a lot of other things about her past and her travels and her dreams, but she never quite told me what my role was in her lifetime story. Later I noticed she never talked about people. She was thrilled and excited by them, everyone, but every time she told a story it was about “that guy I once met” or “there was this girl once” – and she never once mentioned a single name. That got me speculating later, when I was hurt by her forgetting my birthday, that she was too self-centered to remember any names and wondered if she even learnt mine. And I wish the letter from this morning addressed to “Dear Simon” proved the opposite, but I always signed my emails, so it wouldn’t be hard for her to find it out whenever she wanted even if she didn’t know it by heart.
I don’t know how we got to get close in Oklahoma. One day she was the way older stranger girls with too round of a face, dirty blond hair and different eye colours, and the next she was Cat that smiled at me often, made jokes, sang and danced around the house with no self-awareness, and got terribly conscious over trifles. Cat, who had traveled a lot with no money and no apparent talent and who, despite telling everything about herself right away, was an unsolvable mystery.
She once told me not to call her beautiful and that was way before I started regarding her as such. She was doing her best not to be. She showed me hints of her natural hair colour and pictures of her before she changed her diet and made her face too round. She said that there are too many ugly people in the world to make them feel bad for looking the way they do; they were the majority – they set the norms; she wanted to be a part of that majority. She told me how when she was my age she had broken her nose and her friends laughed at it because it looked a bit crooked. But there were people breaking their noses every day, and yet we laugh, she told me. That’s when she dyed her hair first and it was blazing red. “But the damned thing healed right in its place, damned it be!” she said about her nose and told me how if she weren’t afraid of the pain she would break it again right away.
I didn’t quite understand her philosophy, and what confused me the most was that she’d arrived to it when she’d been my age- an age when, I though, every girl tried to look like a supermodel.
“Plus,” she told me, “it’s not how we look but what we do that makes us beautiful.” I had heard all about it before. You know, the charity and Christianity of it, and being a good person. Caring about your soul (and neglecting your body). I was – mildly put – against it. But it wasn’t what she meant. She said that everybody was different and did things differently. And every person had some subtle unique way of doing things you fall in love with. It could be a habit of theirs or simply how they brush their teeth – something other people don’t even notice about that person, but you do and you fall in love with them for it. I guess by the way our relationship developed that she was quite right.
Do you know what the first thing she told me was? I’m surprised I do – she wasn’t important to me then to make me remember. But I do. She said, “Don’t you think you’d just look fabulous if we put green eyeliner around your lips?”
For a while I thought of her as shallow and she did nothing to disclaim this. I feel like the more she sensed how I viewed her, the more her image towards me tried to suit it. Shallow she could be.
I still don’t remember how we got to be close though. I always thoughts that adults never spent quite that much time with children or teenagers and that something must be wrong with her to pay me such high attention. She talked to adults the way she should, but she played with the younger kids at the playground in the park. I got to think of her as a bit slow perhaps at one point. And she spent time with me too.
She liked talking. She enjoyed it the most. It was her most favourite activity. But I guess she liked talking with me, as despite her sing-abouts she talked rarely with the others. I started noticing a sort of awkwardness with her that I thought adults weren’t capable of. She talked occasionally, and when she sat with them her back was so straight that she looked as if she’d swallowed an umbrella. Is that how it’s said? An umbrella or something even straighter. She didn’t sit like that with me. I even felt a hippie vibe when she hung around together, her legs always swinging about in awkward positions regardless of her clothes.
I remember her nails and how they were never properly painted. Too much paint around them and not enough on them. And it was always cracked or slightly peeled off. She did that on purpose. They were painted blue on the day I was leaving, and she hugged me a bit too tight that day, and said that she would miss me. She didn’t have a phone or a laptop or even an address, but she had an email she gave me and said that she’d visit the internet clubs more often to write. She also took my address in case she couldn’t find a computer to write from.
On my way out I told her that her thing was how she pouched her lips when she was thinking, and asked her what mine was. She looked confused. “The unique thing we do,” I prompted, but the way she looked baffled I wish I hadn’t. “Why did you have to say that?” she cried and some people around us turned. She told me how that thing is something we all want to know but we shouldn’t because once you’re conscious of it we’re not as natural doing it or we halt it altogether. Then I left.
She was supposed to stay another month or so, but I found out that she’d gone the next morning. She sent a couple of postcards and a letter, which was disappointingly short and basically saying that she won’t write anymore because she felt it was a one-sided communication. Then I started with my emails, but I never found out if she’d got any of them.
In today’s post there was nothing but her letter. I was so used to her trends for drama and philosophy that I almost convinced myself she’d arranged it that way. In the envelope there was a card and a piece of paper. The card was a wedding invitation and a beautiful one. There was a picture of her and the groom, and her hair was dark almond. The paper along it read:
Dear Simon, (that was my name)
I was wrong.
We had nothing in common when we met in Oklahoma but the fact that we were both guests in the house and that neither of us quite knew what that meant. She was going to stay a while, I was told, but I was there briefly, so even that similarity seemed to mean little when I first heard her name being introduced. And there was no immediate effect her presence caused upon me although I was seventeen at the time and highly impressed by young women. Perhaps it was the fact that she was just about ten years older than me, or that she wasn’t beautiful in the typical sense of the word, not what I would describe as beautiful anyway, that I didn’t notice her right away.
Catherine Snow – another name on the list of people I was supposed to know.
The house where we stayed in Oklahoma was fairly big, much bigger than my own, and while I was constantly on alert of not doing something wrong or not breaking something by accident, despite that I’d been told that that was Catherine’s first visit there, she acted with no such prejudices; she simply owned the house. Who she was staying there with I couldn’t quite find out. I was invited there on an exchange project, and I admitted I knew no one. She didn’t seem to know anyone either, but I couldn’t quite picture an exchange program for adults.
Damn! That’s how I viewed her then!
I sometimes wish I knew what she thought of me on those first couple of days before we started taking our walks around the city. Later, when we strolled, she told me how it would be a pity traveling all the way there and not getting to know the place, as well as she told me a lot of other things about her past and her travels and her dreams, but she never quite told me what my role was in her lifetime story. Later I noticed she never talked about people. She was thrilled and excited by them, everyone, but every time she told a story it was about “that guy I once met” or “there was this girl once” – and she never once mentioned a single name. That got me speculating later, when I was hurt by her forgetting my birthday, that she was too self-centered to remember any names and wondered if she even learnt mine. And I wish the letter from this morning addressed to “Dear Simon” proved the opposite, but I always signed my emails, so it wouldn’t be hard for her to find it out whenever she wanted even if she didn’t know it by heart.
I don’t know how we got to get close in Oklahoma. One day she was the way older stranger girls with too round of a face, dirty blond hair and different eye colours, and the next she was Cat that smiled at me often, made jokes, sang and danced around the house with no self-awareness, and got terribly conscious over trifles. Cat, who had traveled a lot with no money and no apparent talent and who, despite telling everything about herself right away, was an unsolvable mystery.
She once told me not to call her beautiful and that was way before I started regarding her as such. She was doing her best not to be. She showed me hints of her natural hair colour and pictures of her before she changed her diet and made her face too round. She said that there are too many ugly people in the world to make them feel bad for looking the way they do; they were the majority – they set the norms; she wanted to be a part of that majority. She told me how when she was my age she had broken her nose and her friends laughed at it because it looked a bit crooked. But there were people breaking their noses every day, and yet we laugh, she told me. That’s when she dyed her hair first and it was blazing red. “But the damned thing healed right in its place, damned it be!” she said about her nose and told me how if she weren’t afraid of the pain she would break it again right away.
I didn’t quite understand her philosophy, and what confused me the most was that she’d arrived to it when she’d been my age- an age when, I though, every girl tried to look like a supermodel.
“Plus,” she told me, “it’s not how we look but what we do that makes us beautiful.” I had heard all about it before. You know, the charity and Christianity of it, and being a good person. Caring about your soul (and neglecting your body). I was – mildly put – against it. But it wasn’t what she meant. She said that everybody was different and did things differently. And every person had some subtle unique way of doing things you fall in love with. It could be a habit of theirs or simply how they brush their teeth – something other people don’t even notice about that person, but you do and you fall in love with them for it. I guess by the way our relationship developed that she was quite right.
Do you know what the first thing she told me was? I’m surprised I do – she wasn’t important to me then to make me remember. But I do. She said, “Don’t you think you’d just look fabulous if we put green eyeliner around your lips?”
For a while I thought of her as shallow and she did nothing to disclaim this. I feel like the more she sensed how I viewed her, the more her image towards me tried to suit it. Shallow she could be.
I still don’t remember how we got to be close though. I always thoughts that adults never spent quite that much time with children or teenagers and that something must be wrong with her to pay me such high attention. She talked to adults the way she should, but she played with the younger kids at the playground in the park. I got to think of her as a bit slow perhaps at one point. And she spent time with me too.
She liked talking. She enjoyed it the most. It was her most favourite activity. But I guess she liked talking with me, as despite her sing-abouts she talked rarely with the others. I started noticing a sort of awkwardness with her that I thought adults weren’t capable of. She talked occasionally, and when she sat with them her back was so straight that she looked as if she’d swallowed an umbrella. Is that how it’s said? An umbrella or something even straighter. She didn’t sit like that with me. I even felt a hippie vibe when she hung around together, her legs always swinging about in awkward positions regardless of her clothes.
I remember her nails and how they were never properly painted. Too much paint around them and not enough on them. And it was always cracked or slightly peeled off. She did that on purpose. They were painted blue on the day I was leaving, and she hugged me a bit too tight that day, and said that she would miss me. She didn’t have a phone or a laptop or even an address, but she had an email she gave me and said that she’d visit the internet clubs more often to write. She also took my address in case she couldn’t find a computer to write from.
On my way out I told her that her thing was how she pouched her lips when she was thinking, and asked her what mine was. She looked confused. “The unique thing we do,” I prompted, but the way she looked baffled I wish I hadn’t. “Why did you have to say that?” she cried and some people around us turned. She told me how that thing is something we all want to know but we shouldn’t because once you’re conscious of it we’re not as natural doing it or we halt it altogether. Then I left.
She was supposed to stay another month or so, but I found out that she’d gone the next morning. She sent a couple of postcards and a letter, which was disappointingly short and basically saying that she won’t write anymore because she felt it was a one-sided communication. Then I started with my emails, but I never found out if she’d got any of them.
In today’s post there was nothing but her letter. I was so used to her trends for drama and philosophy that I almost convinced myself she’d arranged it that way. In the envelope there was a card and a piece of paper. The card was a wedding invitation and a beautiful one. There was a picture of her and the groom, and her hair was dark almond. The paper along it read:
Dear Simon, (that was my name)
I was wrong.