Melissa

  We left Vermont that Friday morning for the long drive home. Lucinda was extremely Gung-Ho in getting home by now because she was missing her family. We ended up driving straight through and made it all the way back to Colorado in under 25 hours by trading off driving duties and driving through the night. Looking back at it now, it was rather quite insane.

  I had a day or so to recuperate from the trip before I had to be at work again, which was something I needed.  I finally had a chance to check me e-mails and such after being gone a week. Amongst my E-mails I had gotten was an E-mail from a girl named Melissa. I didn’t know her personally, but my friend ‘Jesus’ Dan knew her and told me that she had moved to Colorado about a year ago for school. He had asked me if I could possibly E-mail her and possibly show her around. We E-mailed back and forth once and I never heard from her again.

   I wrote her back and apologized for not getting back to her right away because I had been out of town. She wrote me apologizing for not getting back after our correspondence last year.  She told me that she had thought of me when she saw that there was a Beatles tribute band was playing at the street festival up in Boulder where she was living. She asked if I wanted to go and I told her I would.

  I felt weird about the whole thing while I was driving up there. I never met her in person. I only knew her as a friend of a friend and through her profile picture on ‘Friendster’. I was wondering if I was going to be able to pick her out of the crowd when I actually got there. It turned out it wasn’t that bad. I recognized her quickly enough and the ‘awkward’ small talk didn’t last long before we had started talking about Long Island and all the people and places we did have in common and yet didn’t know each other.

  We ended up walking back and forth up the street for hours talking about what was going on. I told her about Lori and how she moved out and about liking Rachel. She told me that she had recently gotten out of a long term relationship, moved out and moved into a house that had been split into four sub-divisions. She also had been going to school up in Boulder for some kind of psychology degree and thinking about continuing her education down in Denver next semester.

  By 11:00PM we walked over to a homeless guy that was playing a saxophone and Melissa started chatting with him as if she had known this guy. It turns out that she had regularly visited with him on walks she took at night. The guy turned out to be rather interesting. He used to play backup for quite a few famous blues musicians back in the day, but drug use took its toll and gradually, he lost everything. He was used to living on the street for so long that he seemed to accept it as his life now, even though he had children he could contact. Melissa said that his story is pretty common. I had no idea. If it weren’t for Melissa, I probably would have just tried to avoid eye contact…