I still remember this well: It's late afternoon and the sun is at a good slant, casting great shadows across a parking lot at the edge of UTEP. I hear my name called out. I'm not used to that. I live in a city where nobody outside work knows I exist. I could go missing for weeks, maybe months, or even years, and nobody locally would notice anything except for the fact someone would have to be called in to cover my shift. I'm a loner, so it's partly that, but mainly it's because I just moved to El Paso. I hear my name again and turn around.
There before me is a girl with the bluest eyes I have ever seen. They are quite startling even as she is squinting into the sun, her eyes half closed, her face sculpted by that intense El Paso winter light. Perhaps what makes her eyes so intense is that she isn't all that blond. Blue water is significant off a beach but blatant in an isolated desert spring. We expect blue eyes on blonds. Imagine that famous National Geographic picture of the Afghan girl with the green eyes. Keep everything the same, but turn her eyes blue. That was my first real reckoning with Michi. Those eyes made it clear she was a force. Had it not been for her eyes, on the outside, she would blend into the world very well. With them, she stood out.
Later, I would find out her writing was as startlingly beautiful as her eyes. Her eyes caught my attention; her writing held me. I would become mesmerized, which is actually too bad, because it made it hard for us to stay friends.
I don't remember what she said that day. I think she said she liked my poem. It was about drinking rum and Coke from a clear glass with a big, white Snoopy head pictured on it. The poem wasn't very good, and I only remember it because it was the first poem I wrote for the first of many writing workshop classes at UTEP. I'm not sure why I had rum and Coke in that glass to write about in the first place. I did drink occasionally back then, but not at home. Still, there it was, a poem about a clear glass with a white Snoopy head pictured on it filled with what would later blur far too many of my nights.
I don't remember what I said in return. I'm sure it was quick and that I just wanted to get out of there. Girls didn't approach me. Girls didn't try to talk to me. I think they sometimes noticed me, but my shyness was a wall which they respected. She either didn't pick up on the wall or didn't care. Instead, she just hopped on over it.
I cared enough that she did to notice she walked to a little red pick-up when we parted ways. On the tailgate it said "Toy" instead of "Toyota". Later, after a couple of classes together, a couple of poems written off each other's work, and a short but significant friendship, I looked for that truck everywhere, desperately hoping to look into those eyes one last time. When that chance never came, and most of my other connections to El Paso seemed to have ended, I moved back to my hometown in Utah and eventually found Marci and the life I ultimately wanted.
Yet, there is a ghost of me still standing in that parking lot, looking into those amazing eyes. I never fully understood them, but oh how I loved them. I still do. Love never dies unless someone intentionally kills it. Instead, it hangs there suspended in time, a prayer flag flapping in a high Tibetan wind. Now and then, between the clank and clamor of daily life, you'll see it out there beyond the horses, carts and daily commotion, still flying strong.
I wouldn't give up my present life to go back if I could. What I have is more meaningful. Yet, I'm grateful that flag still flies. Life is for loves, present and past. Day to day living, like one thin layer of sand, doesn't mean much. Rather, the meaning is in the layers of life laid down year after year--almost unnoticed--that when later lifted up unexpectedly by a random thought leaves us standing amazed at the rich life we have lived without even noticing we were part of a great creation. In those rare moments, we know it's not what we did or didn't accomplish that matters, but rather the people we met and the experiences we took in along the way.
It is in this light that life is most beautiful. It is in this light that I see Michi standing before me, squinting into the sun, as I realize in an instant those are probably the most intense eyes I will ever see.
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