A Phone Call from an Ouija board

Careless Thoughts

A Bad Memoir of Little Memories

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

-          Dr. Seuss

I often wondered what kind of person I would have become if certain people stayed in my life. How would they have stitched their dreams and hopes into my heart? What would they have done to the makeup of my beliefs? What would I have done to their minds, hearts, and souls?

                I often wondered –

                I hope –

                Maybe, even feebly pray, they think about me when their days are slow. When they sit down after a long day, staring out to a gloomy sight in the depths of Fall, their mind steps back to me from somewhere in the past. They chuckle to themselves over something foolish we did or they smile at the fact, I picked up the phone call. I wouldn’t even mind them cursing my name – at least, then they are thinking about me.

                How many of us sit in the stillness of our minds looking back over those faces we can’t forget? How many of us wondered with a great degree how the friends we once had changed us?

                I wondered this far too much.

                I spend hours – if not days – trying to find the roots of the changes people have made in me.

                But we know –

                In those hazy memories, we can’t go back to those days. Sure, we might send the people we are thinking about a letter or two. We might wish for them to call us. We might even – with the blessing of the Heavens – sit down over a cup of coffee one evening to talk about life. We’ll speak on the matters of our failures, of our dreams yet to come, and of days that have already passed.

                But we can never go back.

                We are not the same people anymore. We have changed, life has done to us, and we have moved on down the road. We are simply fellow travelers passing on by as we all head to the grave.

                This doesn’t make me sad –

                                It is simply life –

                But it fills me with a great solace, nevertheless.

                Sometimes, there are people in the past who we didn’t think made a change in us. We didn’t at the time see how great and grant and important they were to our lives. Until –

                How does that old cliché go?

                Right –

                                We don’t know what we have until we lose it.

                Overplayed, overused, but nevertheless a cliché for a reason.

                I found out this the other week while building a new story. I’m working on a novel called The Dead Bird Trail, and it is about a Serial Killer who gets a magical mask in the mail one day, while an FBI agent starts to hunt down this killer. The agent has been following the mask around for years because other killer used it to murder his father.

                It has been a story sitting the back of my mind for a year now. I came up with it while at work one day doing my rounds. I found a dead bird in the plant, its wings wide open, its neck was broken, and my mind jumped to --- witch!

                The word gave birth to the story.

                I needed a witch in the story, and she found me the other day while I was driving to the coffee shop. The witch in the story is named Megan Chalk, roughly based on a friend I had a high school named Megan (last name not the same). The witch in the story almost as if had placed some kind cruse on my mind making me think a lot about my old friend.

                I believe one the last times I saw Megan was when she was heading down to Atlanta, GA. She had to get out of this town. She had to get somewhere else and away from all the BS of the place we grew up in. A sentiment I understood greatly, and one I shared. I’m not in my home town anymore. Something I’m thankful for every moment of every day.

                On the day Megan was planning to leave she called me up asking to see my best friend Cody and I to say good-bye, farewell, I hope to see you again. It had to be a nasty summer’s day. The heat was almost too much, or maybe, in my mind, the heat had been too much for me.

                It could have not been a summer’s day for all I know.

                We met up at Cookout, a fast food place, and the one near the Concord Mills, for those who know the area. We sat around chatting, eating, but Megan had that healthy mix of fear and excitement for this next chapter in her life. She had no idea what would happen down there, but it had to better than here. It was. I knew she would make it.

                We said goodbye, give each other a hug, and off she went.

                The nasty truth is I didn’t miss her until a couple of weeks later. I had a lot going on in my life, and I couldn’t seem to go back to the idea that Megan, a friend of mine, wasn’t in town anymore, but everything started to stroll back to me. I started to miss her.

                I started too wondered about her.

                And out of the blue –

                She called me one night. To my shock, I was overjoyed about the phone call. It had been months since we met at Cookout. I stood outside in the dark on my driveway walking around talking to her. She had no idea – I didn’t tell her – but that night had been a rough one for me. I have spent most of the nights before the phone call, not sleeping, losing a good handful of friends, and feeling the utter pressure of life. Something I didn’t think I could handle. The demons were winning and I was swallowing the pills they were giving me.

                I was losing it.

                I was close to the edge.

                Megan had been drinking wine and was telling me about the Ouija board she and her roommates had been using the other night. Sadly, nothing came from the board, a disappointment we all felt. We talked about –

                Hm, it is hard to recall outside of the wine and Ouija board what we talked about –

                We must have been talking about a lot of nothing, but I do remember her telling me she would call again. She wanted to talk to me again. It made the night better. I smiled and said I couldn’t wait for the call.

                She did call again, I’m sure of it.

                I’m sure we even met up a few times to hang out over the years, as well.

                Funny, is it not? The little things which stay in our minds like our memories are spider webs holding on tightly to thoughts we can’t let go of. I’m so very glad for those phone calls. I’m so very glad for the person I once knew named Megan. Sure, life has taken us in vastly different directions, and we don’t talk anymore. I don’t get phone calls from her after she had too much wine anymore, but that is for the better. She has made a good life for herself, from what I can tell sitting here. We are still friends that much, I am sure, but life – fate? – The stars above had cast the dice, and I get to puck the memories of her from my spider webs are the gloomy days in the depths of Fall.

                They make me smile.