deep in the ocean, there lies a wave for you

Last Thursday, we took all of our stock back at Dischord, and from now on we’ll be operating entirely from our office with no distribution help from anyone else. We unloaded a giant Penske truck with 11 pallets of records and CDs that day. We recruited some outside help to minimize the amount of physical labor each person would have to pull. My friend Amanda recommended her pal Frank to come help. We were meeting for the first time that morning, though I’d heard a lot about him.

He realized I had been Clark’s girlfriend and said, yeah, I knew him when we were younger, his mom worked at the rec center and we went to camp together. He told me that he and Clark had gotten into a fight over whether or not a tennis racquet was lame. Shit got physical! Mom had to pull the two of them off of each other. They somehow met up again while in their very early 20s, and while hanging out one day Frank saw a picture of Clark and his mother in Clark’s apartment. He said they both had a moment of realization but didn’t outwardly acknowledge that their past went embarrassingly deeper.

A few hours into it, after we’d worked alongside each other for a few hours, he started remembering more. I could see him smile with each recollection. He told me about a sort of posh party he, Clark and a group of others attended. They were drinking and stayed for a little while, but after about an hour or so got ready to leave. But Clark was missing! They suddenly heard thuds from above, and realized Clark was using the roof as a diving board.

I laughed when he told me these things, but as soon as he left, I lost it. I don’t like that I don’t know stories like that, and that there are more of them out there. I don’t even know who has them and can tell them to me. I realize that I know more about Clark than anybody, and that my experience and knowledge is singular.

Similarly, I get very emotional when talking about the fact that Cella and I signed a lease for a new apartment yesterday. It’s great! It needs to happen. But it is another step toward creating this new, post-Clark identity. Right now I live with his best friend, trim a little bit of my grief off by sharing it with him. After we move I will decorate a room of my own to live in by myself – the first space with a permanence since the apartment we last shared together. If I think about it too much, I get really, really scared.