music, books, love and kindness

I am fighting another night of no sleep and feeling a bit tossed and thinking about how happy I was in college...how magical it was, almost...and then I go on Facebook (something I don't do much of anymore) and I see an update from someone I adored way back then. She was probably the first person I ever really saw as a role model who wasn't a teacher or favorite author.

We met one day in the cafeteria. She was so fascinating...her hair all adorably messy, her eyes bright and wide, her hands carrying a fully loaded tray with a tattered copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude tucked under one arm. She had this energy that drew me to her right away. And she was a junior while I was a freshman so there was also that aspect of "looking up to" to as well.

We would end sharing several classes together the two years we overlapped and I loved her take on all the different stories and novels we read in our Irish fiction course. Often, we would traipse to the dining hall together discussing something we had just read. Her mind was wonderfully wild and it turned out she could sing and dance (really, really well) and was theatrically bound.

Before I met her I had never heard of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She spoke of him in way that made it impossible not to read him. Though her dreams were for Broadway (and she certainly could have made it there) she ended up becoming a well-respected writer, which only seems fitting, given how much passion she had for books when I knew her in college.

I remember the nerve it took me to Facebook her a while back. "What is she remembers how dorky I was around her?" I worried. "Or what if she knew I had a crush on her?" She always was kind to me and often patted me on the head (somehow this didn't insult me because it had happened before and still does with other people) and I just always had the sense she kind of knew and it didn't bother her. Still, I was pleasantly surprised when she not only accepted my request, but wrote me a nice note back.

She is probably the one (of the very few) people I ever had feelings for that I could be perfectly normal around. Maybe it was because she could put anyone at ease and had the most terrifically bizarre sense of humor and she accepted everyone.

Tonight, when I saw her photo (with a favorite professor of mine whom I also looked up to and who gave me my crazy passion for Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne) I felt joy. She is really, really happy, I thought, her dreams have come true and she is doing what she loves and she deserves it so very much. I remember her for so many reasons and I will never forget her for how she made people feel when they were around her: alive and thriving.