i want you to be real dante. i think thats the point. we talk so well
through our words. would we be the same when faced with eachother? would
we spill as much as we do? or is this just a fantasy? would we embrace and
sit somewhere talking til 5 am? or would we realize how real we both
are...and go seperate ways?

You didn't understand, did you? Or maybe you did. I didn't want you to be real.
Real things break. Fantasy lived in perfection.

It was over two years ago. We'd "met" online. I'd come across her web page, and happened to catch her on IRC. Instant... I don't want to call it infatuation, but it was close... recognition, I guess you'd say. When Adam met Eve, did he say, "You remind me of a rib I once knew?" It was how she made me familiar with a part of me I longed for, and had not seen for a long time. She was alive, in a raw, bloody way. She saw the colors, the bright red, the dangerous yellow, the blues and greens. Her writings were so... almost me, but different, in the way that she represented the complement to what I still had.

She wasn't real.

Nor was I.

Reality's scary. Think about it. TV and movie stars look great. Real people on TV have blotches.

I could tell her anything, and did. I could tell her everything, and did. She let me in on her world, too. To an extent we lived through each other somewhat vicariously, but I knew that she did far more living, and I was scared. Either she'd turn out in reality to be less than she seemed -- less magical, less mysterious, less worth fantasizing about, or she'd be exactly as I thought of her. Neither idea was appealing.

She'd be taken down from her pedestal, or she'd stay there, and I'd remain boring.

-

By the time we met, most of the shininess was gone from the early days. I don't pretend to have figured her out, she's still something I'll never understand. She'd changed from 19 to 21 between the first phone call and that day in New York. I'd gone from University senior to semi-responsible working adult. We'd both grown years. Reality had set in, and we'd gone from screaming at each other on the phone with passion to crying to one another to spite and not talking and silence... to talking again. I'd missed my friend. When it was time to make her real, when I needed my friend to be real, and not to be a mystical lifeblood for me, that's when it was OK to meet.

It's harder now... now that we've met. Now that we've met, and I've moved 3000 miles away, and I've only seen her twice. She's real, as are the 3000 miles. I miss my friend.

Sometime soon, lis.

-Anthony Dante Ortenzi 13Jan01





      ©2001 Anthony Dante Ortenzi