Onee-Chan

"You're thinking of her again aren't you?" he asked.  No, not asked, said, it was not a question.  

I looked at them.  "Am I that obvious?"

"You're kissing your iPod... that's what you do when you think of her."  It was true I realized, I had my i-pod head phones pressed to my lips.  

"Besides" she said, "you just missed a To Kazan'[1] moment!  Something's wrong Nick!" 

I looked at them, Matt and Michelle, they both deserved better than this, better than a Nick who was distracted and lost in the past.  "I'm sorry--" I began.

But Michelle cut me off in her brisk up beat way, "don't be sorry, don't apologize, here is there something you want to do?"  It was as though she thought she could make everything vanish in a wave of efficient happiness.  Matt looked on, knowing well enough to know that there was nothing he could do.

"I'm alright" I said, re-focusing on the movie--Rango--that was playing on the same TV we had pretended to focus on so long ago when it was the four of us, Matt and Michelle, Lara and I.  

"No you're not!" Michelle began, opening her "mother" routine.  I could never decide if that routine was more helpful or annoying.

But Matt put his hand on her arm and whispered "just let him be Michelle."  And just like that, I was left with my memories.  

While apparently "absorbed" in the movie I tried to catalog what Lara was to me.  When Rango discovered "Dirt"[2] I discovered that memories have a peculiar way of becoming images.  

"Lara" was the whole string of memories that I couldn't suppress.  Like last winter when we dove down the Wellesley College Hill (I didn't have a sled so I gave it a try and it was better than just standing around).  And the soft, caring look that made her face look so much younger, like a little girl's.  And the look of horrified sympathy when I dove face first into the snow and heard a crack that I thought meant my nose was broken for sure.  She didn't blanch at the blood that covered my face, or run off to Chris once she saw that I was okay.

Perhaps this attachment came from the feeling of her room, sitting on her bed that time when I asked her "what does chocolate taste like?"  I swear I'll never forget her answer (I wrote it down as soon as I finished laughing)... "Like sleeping under a warm fuzzy red blanket on a dark winter night" she said.  I loved that about her; it was perfect, she right: that was exactly the feeling you get from chocolate.  

As Rango killed a hawk by tricking it into flying into a water tower I smiled, as if I were watching.  "Lara", I'd said, "in a totally non-sexual way I love you so much right now."  Perhaps what my smile showed was warmer than her 80 degree room (a room I always loved even though I complained about it every time).  

As Rango became head sheriff of Dirt I remembered that feeling that I somehow could never explain properly.  Not that I haven't tried.  I have.  Every time I do whoever I tell it to asks me "was she your girl friend?"  And I sigh, because they didn't understand and say "yes, for 7 days... but no, that's not what I'm talking about."  So I guess I'm telling it wrong.  

There are friends who make you smile and you have a good time with.  And there are girl friends who you like and who you feel romantic for.  And then there is "Lara" who isn't quite either but perhaps a bit of both?  "She's onee-chan"[3] I would say which meant "older sister."  But even that missed the mark.  

Any time I try I end up talking for ten minutes about the time when I came over to her house an hour early (thinking I was an hour late... long story) and she welcomed me as if I was supposed to be there.  And I'll tell about the times she would come after school with me.  Well, that's worth telling actually...

See last year I lived at school.  There's even a rumor among my friends that I slept over there some times.  (Trust me, that's not true, my parents would have killed me).  But seriously, I was there more than the teachers.  I got in to that ancient building[4] for school and didn't leave.  I'd play basketball with Matt, or hang out on the windowsill[5].  And then we'd go to the third floor.  Don't ask me why, that's just what we did.  

She's the one who joined me in the fading golden peace of evening.  After everyone else left she'd stay on the third floor across the hall from a painting I never fully understood.  On ancient tile floors we'd sit there around my computer and listen to music, or watch Pokemon (you can laugh).  But that was just a sort of background.  What really made it special was that it was with her.  Ahhh damn it, there we go again now it sounds like I loved her, that she was my girl friend.  Well, I suppose in a way I really did love her.  

How should I say it?  It was something like the feeling you get sitting in the sun in the summer.  You know?  That feeling that nothing can go wrong, when you're so at ease you can almost feel all the knots in your shoulders coming undone?  The warmth that seems to radiate through you.  But I didn't want her as a girl friend.  I didn't look at her and think "oh my god she's hot" I didn't have any fantasies about kissing her.  I just... hell, I suppose I loved her, but not that way.  She just... look, who else can you sit and watch POKEMON with for Christ's sake?  Like really, anyone else I'd be ashamed to watch it for fear of being ridiculed.  I suppose that's the best way of putting it.  

Maybe it was the Japanese-ness of her house that did it.  The way her old room had two inch high mats for beds just like the ones I'd seen in model Japanese houses in the Museum of Fine Arts.  Or the curtains that hung in place of doors.  And the incense that always seemed to be there like a calm wind, breathing peace. 

Or the obvious love her parents felt for each other and for her and for everyone.  You could see it in their smiles and their willingness to surrender their house to us crazy teenagers.  And in the way they sat together in the family room.  Maybe it was the free root beer[6] that was always waiting for us in the fabled cold room that Michelle never quite lost the reputation for getting lost looking for[7].  Something about that house became my refuge where I fled my parents or went to escape SAT prep.  

And maybe there was the feeling of 2 a.m. peace after spending 5 hours shooting ideas back and forth in playful debate.  Some (most) people would very quickly decide never to talk to me again.  But somehow she came back day after day.  

I don't remember if I even said "hi" to my parents when I got home before I ran up stairs to find her online and send her a message to begin our nightly discussions.  It was a way out, like reading perhaps, or a movie, or video-games, a way to disappear and heal.  So I dove into those conversations and found myself swimming in them, so that the words from skype[8] were everywhere, floating throughout my day.  

She was my journal.  I didn't need to hide it from her that I screamed at my parents and hated them.  And she was the one I told when I thought about cutting or when I broke the second floor exit sign.  I suppose I could tell it that way: that she was my way of letting everything out of me like an over filled balloon.  But that's just as wrong as all the others, that's a better description for her pet rock Pete.[9] Pete listened silently and without judging as only a rock can do.  From Lara, though, I could tell anything and still find well, acceptance.  

And maybe that's it, the sense of acceptance and being liked, not for any mask that I wore for everyone else, but for me.  She had a way that showed she saw something in the angry and angsty teenager, the not so athletic baseball and basketball high school-er, the writer who showed up repeatedly on her doorstep.  There's a feeling that she gave off, to me, and probably to everyone else, that she knew who I was in spite of--or perhaps because of--everything I told her, she still found something lovable in me.    

So as Rango searched for the lost water I searched for what exactly "Lara" meant to me.  Trust, sure.  Yes, she was Chris's girl friend, but there was a sort of intimacy that had nothing to do with a girl friend.  She had the sense of humor to answer that chocolate tasted "Like sleeping under a warm fuzzy red blanket on a dark winter night."  

She was more than the girl who has the ENTIRE collection of Pokemon movies has brought them back for me to see... or did until recently...  

She was more than the studious girl who was going to go to Tufts and who studied and for 5 hours every day her junior year.  She was more than "the anime girl" that most people knew her as.[10]

Yes, it was also Lara who offered her house as sanctuary when my dad yelled at me.  She was the one who answered the phone at 2 a.m. when I called her to save me from myself.  And who stayed up till 2 or even 3 am every night talking to me on skype about everything from Pokemon to the nature of humanity.  Didn't that also play into who Lara was to me?  A place of refuge like The Shire,[11] as true as any of the fellowship, always there when I needed her.  Even if it was just to lend an ear or to calm me down.   

Yes, Lara was the Disney Princess,[12] but she wasn't that shallow, she taught me to be kind to people and smile.  So what did that make her?  My teacher on humanity?  Like a sister... that's how I describe her.  Onee-chan.  

I gave up. Onee-chan--and everything she meant to me--was still too hard to classify.  It wasn't quite a best friend, like Matt, though in some ways it was similar.  Nor was she quite a girl friend, as Elena "my old girl friend" had been, since I didn't like her that way.  Whatever it was that pulled me to her, would have to wait till another day.  

And so, as Rango and friends fled from aerial attacks from creatures that wanted water I re-focused just in time to watch Rango's amazing "rescue" attempt and the discovery that the hard fought over water jar was... empty.[13]  

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] The full history of this comment is too long for a footnote, but last year Michelle and I had taken a Russian History course together.  At one point we watched Ivan The Terrible Part I.  There’s a point about ½ way through when Ivan rallies his army by crying “To Kazan!” (Kazan is a city in modern day Ukraine that was then at war with Moscovy, the name for Russia then).  I believe we counted 27 times (though I may be wrong).  We never stopped referencing it and other people, outside the class began to use it as well. 

[2] For those of you who spent the two weeks Rango was in theaters reading and somehow neglected to buy it when it came out in DVD, Dirt is the name of the town in Rango in the midst of the desert.  Aptly named no? 

[3] (Japanese)

[4] I believe the building was built in the 1940s. 

[5] There used to be a windowsill about 20 feet long and wide enough for us to sit on where we'd spend our free time there

[6] Sometimes it was a weird but delightful licorice flavor and sometimes it was A&W (I later found out that they got it just for us, since no one in the family drank it).

[7] This happened before I ever came to the house, so I wasn’t there, but I heard about it on a regular basis.  Apparently she went off to get a drink from the cold room and got lost, how I don’t know, but it must have been true because Lara (who is almost always honest) kept joking about it.

[8] For those who don’t live at their computer, skype is like any other chat interface, AOL where you can talk with your friends for free. 

[9] Pete isn't a rock she was gypped into buying in some tourist trap town, and no matter how much she seemed like the little kid who would love that and buy one she was sharper than that.  Pete was a giant rock of obsidian that I could never understand how she had managed to dig from the ground.  She had found it years ago in California when her family lived there and somehow the young Lara had decided to dig it out and send it home.  There, she cleaned it up, named it Pete, and kept it in her room. 

 

[10] She used to be the President of the Anime (Japanese animated movies) club at our High School, she drew her own manga (Japanese comic books) and had read more manga/ anime than anyone else I’ve ever met (even in the Anime club since I joined this year).  She also owned and memorized all the Miazaki (a major Japanese anime movie maker and artist) movies.  

[11] For those of you too busy watching Rango to read (or even watch) Lord of the Rings (it’s a classic people, it’s where all fantasy since has sprung) The Shire, as the name implies, is a place of refuge and safety for “the little folk” or hobbits. 

[12] She owned every movie from Mulan (my personal favorite) to The Princess and the Frog and was determined to show them all to me once she realized my parents--fearing that I would become addicted to TV--refused to show them to me.

[13] Sorry if I just spoiled the movie for you…. Don’t worry there’s still a lot more waiting after that point.  

Author's Note

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(sorry about the endnotes writers cafe doesn't do footnotes as they were ment to be... still trying to figure out how to do that properly...