grace in your heart, flowers in your hair

sometimes i try to think about my happiest days and here is one of the best

in november of 2009, i had plans to hang out with my friends for the day. it was about 11:30 on a saturday. i got there really early for some reason that i don’t remember and i was waiting for them in starbucks and i got a hot chocolate because i do not enjoy coffee very much and it was cold and windy outside. so i was there, sitting around and minding my own business and enjoying my hot chocolate, and this girl came out of nowhere and sat at my table. and she just started talking to me and i was like okay this is cool and i started to introduce myself and she was like, “no no no we are not exchanging names we are going to do something more exciting!” and i was very visibly confused by this strange turn of events but i went along with it because usually things are boring in my life and this was turning out quite nicely so far.

so she explained that we were going to have aliases and i was like sure that sounds cool. so i chose the name joe and she chose anna and then we were joe and anna. we also further expanded upon the rules for the day to include not revealing personal details because then eventually someone could probably figure out enough to find out who the other person was. for example, in st. louis, one of the first things people ask people who they are meeting for the first time is where they go to high school and you can get a ridiculous amount of information from just that so we crossed that question off the list.

anyway, after the rules and such were established we started talking about things that interested us and we had a lot of things in common and it was nice. i asked her why she chose the name anna and she said it was because anna karenina was her favorite book and then i mentioned that i had recently read war and peace and we talked about russian authors and then we made our way to french ones and eventually books in general and that went on for a long time (or what seemed like a long time to me) and then we got into music and we liked most of the same stuff in that department as well. i think about that a lot, actually. usually when i meet someone with one thing in common with me, they tend to like the majority of other things that i like as well.

but then i remembered i was waiting for my friends and this was going very nicely so far and i did not want it to end. i told anna this and she suggested we ditch them and go to a bookstore downtown and i thought it was a great idea because my friends would never even think to look for me in a bookstore. also, after this point we decided to turn our phones off so no one would interrupt our lovely day.

so we took a bus downtown to left bank and we perused through many books and traded suggestions on what to read and we went to the poetry suggestion and had private poetry reading of w. b. yeats finest works and i had never really delved into poetry much before but i began to like it a lot more after this point. after an hour or so of stumbling around the bookstore we decided we were hungry and wanted to get lunch but i do not traverse downtown st. louis much so i let anna pick where we went because she had pretty much been in charge of everything else anyway.

we ended up walking to this place called the london tea room. it started to rain on our way over and then we ran and it was a nice moment, running in the rain with this strange girl. but we arrived and i had the most delicious grilled cheese sandwich in the word and she had a turkey and bacon panini and i had some of it also and it was delicious. i had water because i am a very plain person but anna had this weird orange tea and we stayed there for a while because she was sipping it very slowly because, as she said, “i’m trying to savor the flavor. you can’t rush a good cup of tea.” and i was just like who are you what the hell is happening right now but i did not actually say that, i thought it and that is why it is in italics.

then we departed and anna said we needed to figure out what time it was because we had no phones or watches so i stopped a businessman looking fellow and asked him for the time and he said that it was about 2 and anna said, “okay, we’re totally on time then.” and i was confused but i was used to it by then because it seemed to be the recurring theme of the day, me being out of the loop (that is a funny joke because the place i was in at the beginning of this post is an area of st. louis called the loop and i was no longer there, i was in downtown st. louis).

she suggested we go to the zoo so we took another bus down to forest park and wandered around there. the zoo in november is an interesting place, though. it’s nearly empty and sometimes the animals just aren’t there because it is getting too cold for some of them, but it’s still fun to go there when you have nothing better to do than walk around and talk. i remember watching the owls with anna for a long time and talking about weird incidents with birds and then suddenly an hour had passed and we went to art hill.

art hill is a big hill located in front of our art museum and it overlooks a lake and it’s very pretty and people often sit at the top and just watch people paddle along in little boats and i like it a lot. we continued our conversation, which had been pretty continuous since earlier that morning, and it was still nice and not bland which was cool because it’s hard to hold a conversation with people for that long but somehow this was working nicely and i enjoyed it very much so. we talked about food and our favorite places to eat and childhood memories and our views on everything and this continued for a long time until it was nearly dinner time and she suggested we go eat at a place called duff’s.

we walked through the park and it took about 45 minutes but eventually we got there and it was not crowded at all so we didn’t have to wait. there was a poetry reading thing going on when we were there eating and it was interesting to me because i had never really seen people read poetry like these guys were doing and i thought it was great.

then i tried lead the conversation towards more serious subjects because i wanted to know why she doing this because i did not understand anything about this entire day at all so far. she explained that she had tried it a few times but no one had taken to her advances, which was surprising because she was very attractive and when attractive girls want to be my friend i tend to say yes. then i asked why and she said, “i just thought it would be fun! is it?” and i said yes because yes, it was fun. it was pretty amazing, actually. then she said we had other plans and other places to be so we left the fantastic poetry place and headed down to a free concert thing at a school downtown.

there were a few bands there and one was this band called pretty little empire and they are a local band and my friend had mentioned them to me before because she invited me to a different show of their’s in a couple weeks because she is friends with a guy in the band and i had met him once before so we were acquaintances and i talked to him and i told him i was going to see them with her in a couple of weeks and he said he would put me on the list and i was like wow i am probably the coolest person in this room right now.

anna made some new friends as well and these girls invited us to a party at some weird apartment downtown and it looked super sketchy but this whole day was pretty sketchy already so we continued on. i’d say the theme of the party was “poor college student” and it was actually nice despite that because everyone was so cool and friendly and it was not sketchy at all and then we were all drunk and we danced and at one point john coltrane started playing and it was the song giant steps. i don’t know if you guys know that song or not but it is very fast and somebody was like, “everybody dance!” and everybody did and no one could keep up and people fell over and then mostly everyone was on the floor taking a break from all the strenuous dancing that was being done and it was just john coltrane in the background and that was it.

so we partied and mingled with all these strangers and had a nice time and everyone was really nice to us because we were very obviously the youngest people there and everyone could tell and they were drunk and they felt the need to dole out advice to us. they went with the strategy of talking a lot and eventually something slightly wise and not terrible would come out because if you say enough things eventually you are bound to say something that is not entirely bad and could even be considered kind of good. it’s like taking a million pictures of something to get one good shot or something i dunno.

and by the time we were done talking to people the party was dying out and everyone was leaving or people were falling asleep and i asked anna if we were ending our night or doing other things and, of course, we were doing other things even though we were both slightly drunk teenagers who should not be wandering around downtown st. louis at 2 am we ventured forth into the night recklessly and we went to the golf course in forest park.

forest park at night is a terrible place to go, by the way. just in case any of you are ever in st. louis, don’t go there at night because you will probably get mugged. miraculously, though, we did not and we also snuck past a cop who was doing his rounds or something in the park, probably looking for muggers and such. so we arrived at the golf course and snuck in and i guess they have no security or shitty security that doesn’t care but we sat on the green of the 12th hole and it was nice but freezing so were huddled up together and we drunkenly rambled about things and eventually anna said we should go find a place to crash for the night and the only place i knew was my grandma’s old house that hadn’t been sold yet and no one was currently living there so that is where we went.

we could not find a bus so we took a cab and i think that was maybe my first cab ride ever and the driver was nice and he talked to us about lots of things and then we were at my grandma’s house and i sensed that this beautiful day was coming to an end and i was sad. but we went inside and i don’t remember how this happened but anna put some music on and it was billie holiday and it was the song p.s. i love you and wow that is a good song and then i was forced to slow dance and i was like okay because everything on this particular day had been going my way already so i felt like i could do anything and not be terrible at it. not that slow dancing is terribly hard or anything, i just dislike dancing with people most of the time i guess but this was a nice dance. then we kissed and that was nice and that happened for a little while and then we went to the bedroom but all we did was sleep.

then i woke up in the morning and she was gone and there was no note or anything and i was sad but i had assumed that was going to happen because she didn’t want to exchange names or personal details and all in all she was a very strange person but it was a great day and that’s all that really mattered.

i tried to figure out who she was but i never could and that is the end of this story. but! a couple weeks later i looked in my wallet and noticed a little “a” on my demerit card from school and she actually had left a note on the back of it and when people sometimes go through my wallet they ask me why it’s in there and i say no reason but they never bother to look at the back of it and that is where the note is and i am not showing you guys because it is my note.