Part of Day 2

So the second day of knowing brian, we went up to the mountain. he was very excited and right when we got there, he, who already had everything he needed, headed up a ski lift. armin and i had to rent all of our gear with most of the other kids on the trip. after we got our stuff, i think we saw brian briefly at the bottom of the mountain, he had taken a few runs already and was probably more excited for us to be going up the mountain than we were for ourselves. We left him soon after that and headed for the bunny slopes. armin was on a snowboard and i was on skis. armin was just learning to snowboard and couldn't yet connect his turns, so he spent the whole day on his heels, back facing up and he slipped and slidded down the mountain. i was alright on ski. i knew how to do the side stop thing and could get up some okay speed. sometime around midmorning, we ran into brian again.

its strange, i have told this story so many times. especially that first week of february 2005, i felt like i told this story so many times that it became one dimensional, like i was reciting the plot of a tv show. and it almost sounds like it could be the such a plot. brian loved that kind of thing, the story afterward, especially if it were a cool story. and i think he would love how this one sounded, especially since it reveals each of our personalities as if it were a parable. It also has the benefit of having a lesson and a punchline. it was so damn self-contained that i couldn't help re-telling it over and over, even when it lost its originality and spunk and any organic meaning. i could feel myself telling the story in the same way, over and over, pausing in the same parts, saying brian's lines in a brian voice that did not resemble his voice at all, saying my lines in a voice similarly distant from a tone i would ever take. anyway, here is what happened. the moment that i could look back on, almost exactly three years after it happened, and say, yep, it was that moment, that moment when he fully caught my interest, when i knew him impact on my life would be huge.

So, armin and i ran into brian at the bottom of a run, where the bunny slope and a harder run emptied out. Brian asked us if we were having a good time, and we said yes. he then asked me if i had fallen a lot. his expression was the joking one he wore often, as if he wasn't really asking a serious question. but he was always serious about the question. they were never retorical or time or space fillers. i responded, probably haughtily, that i never fell. my tone was intended to convay to him that i was a good athlete, i picked sports up quickly, i was probably a natural on skies, and if he had seen me, he would probably know that. his response, however, was typical brian. he refused to be intimiated and responded in the same jovial tone, that i must not have been pushing myself hard enough. this, of course, stopped me short, because, like i said, i was supposed to be a natural. no one had ever questioned my athletic talents before.

so here is the punchline, because really, i have told this story so much and tried to infuse so much meaning into it that it really has lost all meaning for me, was that brian talked me into going down a green, the next level up from the bunny slope. he ended up taking me down a black diamond, a fact that he didn't tell me until i got to the bottom, and the he said, "congratulations, you just did your first black diamond." neadless to say, we spend the rest of the day on the slopes together. poor armin said he felt like a third wheel. by the end of the day, brian had me going off jumps. not that i got crazy, mind you, i didn't get that much air, i am not by nature a risk taker, but i had to impress this kid and show him that i could keep up.

i still wasn't sure what i wanted to do about him. and really, i know this is crucial to the story, but i just don't have the energy to tell it right now. so you (whoever you are, if you are indeed anyone) will just have to wait to hear how our day came to an end. i suppose i am tired, and have a bit of a headache. the same one i have had for a week and a half. i also just finished a little bit of a cry. i sent andrew an email, and he always does the auto response thing. this time it included a link of some plays that he had written. so i thought i would check a few out. he writes very well, but for some reason i was devistated that brian wasn't in any of the plays and that none were about him. he had evan, ryan and alex as characters. and it made me so sad to see that their names could all be together without brian. i have always wanted there to be a whole in that group, his whole, the whole that brian's absence left. but i never saw one. they all just re-coalesced. i don't know why i need them to be as messed up as i am about it all. and maybe they are, i didn't know them very well before (and still don't know them well) but it drives me crazy that it doesn't seem that their foundation has been destroyed. even more than me, i thought that their lives should have been torn apart. maybe because they are boys. maybe because they are younger than i. maybe because you have a different relationship with your friends than you do with intimate partners (intimate partern, eh, well, its a better discriptive phrase than lovers, or whatever other gender neutral phrase can be used to describe boyfriends and girlfriends, which is also sounds like a very juvenile term). maybe they just don't show me their feelings (except alex, sometimes). whatever it is, i feel like we should have a bond because we shared this together, and i would consider them family, if only they would let me. they were brian's brothers, and he was my family, so by extension, they should be my family now.

okay, now im really going to stop, and send my good night into the black hole. good night, sweet.