ACCOZZAGLIA

last night, i sent a photo of me with my very best friend from summer 2002 to my new friend, janelleovl. i wanted to show her, for whatever reason, how the chemistry and covalent bond between myself and svairini is something palpable and apparent to the lay observer — even in some informal, semi-posed shot, where i recall being slightly miffed with her that day for something arguably trivial.

now that i’ve had the photo up on my screen in a background window for the last day, i’m seeming to have trouble in closing it. the picture is archived and permanently available, but i can’t let myself put it away. doing so, for some reason, feels like i’m closing the book on something. trouble is, i’m not sure what.

the Minnesota State Fair opened yesterday. i haven’t looked it up anywhere. i just know this from instinct. i have that so engrained into my DNA now that i can all but say with authenticity that my adopted home of origin is now and always will be Minneapolis — not Houston, where i spent seventeen of my first twenty years.

what this means is that even if i find a home for my soul, my body and my heart, such as Toronto, Minneapolis will still be where i feel like i came of age, despite the sheer hell i endured there. while my life was encased in ice, people still came by to visit me and see how i was doing during those five years. this is metaphor, of course, and those who don’t know me well enough are going to leave themselves scratching their heads at that impression.

but i’m avoiding the whole point of why i can’t put the photo away.

because svairini has never been a big email writer, i knew that our ability to keep tabs on each other was contigent on her use of LJ, IM and the phone. plus, when i left, the social fabric of her life fundamentally changed when she took on the dignified responsibility of tending to and being guardian of her then fifteen year-old cousin yauvanzri, who’d been pretty much neglected by her estranged parents and by her paternal uncle and aunt (who are both svairini’s parents in rural Michigan and yauvanzri’s former legal guardians).

when i left home last October after a whirlwind month where i was pretty much gone all of September, i understood that svairini and i would be communicating less with each other. she had a kid to finish raising midway in the game with no prior training or parenting experience.

from nearly five years in our five-year relationship of seeing each other nearly every single day that we were both in town; of having each other’s house keys to stop by whenever we were in each other’s hoods; of springing for an impromptu walk on the Stone Arch Bridge or foodie run at any nearby, cheap hole-in-the-wall joint where we were considered “regulars”; of making quick runs to Targay or Rainbow or Home Despit; of hanging out in her apartment, doing a bunch of whatever with the telly always off (cos few of us there ever watched much telly); and of us going to the state fair virtually every year without fail (1999 being the sole exception, i think), we’ve heard less from each other in these last twelve months than we used to in a couple of weeks of living practically next door.

i’m not sure what to make of it. i left the rhythm of the Twin Cities last year, and it churned on without me, just as it naturally should. svairini went from suddenly dealing with her own life and her own needs and finding solace in coming to terms with a lot in her own life to being an accidental head of household, feeding for two mouths, sending a kid to public school, finding said kid resources to attend to her needs and working a new, highly demanding full-time job.

for those who don’t know us, it was originally her who was supposed to move to the west coast, not me. she was all but slated to move in with her older cousin in San Jose for a trial six-month run before yauvanzri’s arrival and eventual stay in a safe place dropped suddenly into the equation.

then, as that familial drama played out, i fell in love with this girl out in the Pacific Northwest, and geographically, very much in every sense of those two words (being in the northwest corner of that region, two kilometres from the sound shoreline). i made the risky decision of moving out to an area that is far removed from everything, just as an existing national recession only got worse and affected this area worse than anywhere else in the nation.

neither of us ever planned for it to be this way. svairini thought she would head west, and i was all but certain that i was to trek east to start attending university at some place like NYU, Yale or Brown.

one year later, i can’t say with reliability or authenticity what svairini is doing these days. i know little of the details — sundry or crucial — of what 2003 has been like for her. after writing her in depth a couple of times just after arriving here, i’ve pretty much given up, because i know that when she doesn’t respond, it’s nothing personal: she draws excellent boundaries, and when she doesn’t have the capacity to do something, she won’t.

furthermore, she isn’t an avid email writer. she never has been. this is partly preservation of her wrists, because of the threat of carpal tunnel syndrome lurking around the corner every single day. and because she’s so tired after coming home from work, she does not use instant message, nor does she like to use the phone.

my lingering last memory of her, despite the intermittent correspondence between us since my departure, is of a moment just hours before i left Minneapolis. we’d reached a point where we’d moved what we could out of my apartment, much of it heading to my storage closet and in her parents’ borrowed minivan.

suddenly, with me behind her as we headed outside into the raw, unusually cold night, she halted in her tracks, turned around, grabbed me tightly and came unglued. and i followed instinctively, because i was already there, trying desperately to stave it off until the latest possible moment. the occasional pedestrian in the early AM hours would walk by without pause to our very audible bawling, with them moving at a heady jaunt as a way of just trying to keep from freezing to death in the unseasonably early nip.

we knew this was it. we weren’t sure what it was, but we knew that that was the very last moment of an entire volume of our lives, the last page in an installment in some trilogy which may still be playing itself out as we speak.

it hurts to remember that moment, even though it was imbued with an unreplicable authenticity and unbreakable sentiment of pure, unconditional love — unconditional in the least clichéd sense possible.

i miss that woman so much. she is my other half. she is my sister. my fraternal twin.

i’m a strong girl. i’ve done as well as i can without her in my daily life for the last year. but every now and again, such as lately, i get to this point where i just really need to be with her, or barring that, to just be in close reach with her. but until her life frees up a little, this won’t be much of an option.

it’s just the way it is, even if that doesn’t mean it’s easy. or even if it doesn’t mean that i go through so many tissues that my face bloats in mottled crimson and my eyes burn from the salinity.

such as the way things are tonight.