Forgotten Keys

Some times I forget things. Sometimes I forget keys. Sometimes I forget credit cards and money. Sometimes I forget about people.

I saw someone yesterday that I desperately have been wanting to meet for about three years. Well, maybe not the whole three years, but close. The times where a meeting was not on my mind were few at first and then more and more as years washed and swashed on my tide dominated coastline. At first I wanted to run into him so desperately that I was truly in fear of spending a life of incarceration if I were to see him.

Blood would spill when our two universes crossed paths again. He was a chubby English major with soft scholastic features and a scraggly psuedo-intellectual beard. Destined for the halls of academia or the ivory tower of literaria, his destruction of my life, or at least the aspects of destruction I could lay at his feet, was probably an excercise in life experience. His life experience would bleed out from his lacerations in my fantastical meetings here and there.

I only ran into him once in the time since his transgression onto my life's shore. The rage I felt at just seeing him made me flush red and my muscles pump in anticipation of justice being meeted out in the most respectable way possible: good old fashioned beating of an ass. Luckily for him and, honeslty, me our meeting place was in the venue of a church service. There is no way I could ever spill another's blood in a church. After the service, I walked up to his small podium where his drum set was partitioned off from the rest of the stage and took his drum sticks from his hand. He had a look of intense and terrible fear written all over his soft face. After a brief discussion of the things I wanted to do to him, I left the church house, never to return.

Today, I sat at a bar drinking a beer and watching Swedish curling. I sat transfixed by this sport on the small TV. My mind's upper functions were rationalizing radical numbers in denominators while my hands followed along on my lined notebook paper. My baser aspects of mind were wholly taken by men with stones and brooms. The beer was no help. After a particularly good toss, a voice caught my full and undivided attention. Nasally, a little on the lispy side, a touch of over pronunciation borne of compensating over confidence. I knew it, but my beer and algebra soaked mind would not come back to me and name the owner. I looked over at him as he looked at me. It was in the eyes that I saw the identity of the talker printed out clearly on his face. He lost his intelligent, pretentious edge and became the scared little boy who I had come to know. He said nothing, and a crushing apathy kept me from pushing the subject that should have been silently heating up the air between us. He simply got up from his stool and left.

I sat watching curling. My thoughts completely divorced from the frozen shuffleboard and the pencil heiroglyphs on my page, I sat and tried to remember what I thought at one time I would never forget.

Jim? No.

James? No.

Jeremy? Might be. No.

What the hell is the guy's name?