I still dream about Amy Cook. I couldn’t tell you how often it happens, because each time it’s as if she’s been there all along, lurking in a corner of my subconscious which, during those moments, looks an awful lot like the Gwinnett Place Mall.
I’m not a dream analyst or anything, but I imagine she’s there- at the mall, I mean- because during the brief period of time in which our lives overlapped, it happened to be the most convenient place for our parents to drop us off for our occasional meeting; it was equidistant from my parents’ house in Alpharetta and hers’ in Lilburn. So we would meet in that suburban no-man’s land for an hour or two, catching up over an Orange Julius and perusing the new releases at Camelot Music while our mothers scoured the Macy’s or Rich’s department stores for deals.
If they were so inclined, I’m sure the set designers of my sleep could offer us a more inspired setting- Amy and I first became acquainted, after all, along the meandering Etowah and Chestatee Rivers of North Georgia. There could be waterfalls and mountain laurels and rope swings swaying two feet above the surface and perfectly polished skipping stones lining the riverbed.
I wrote a short story once, in my 12th grade composition course, about a boy who found the perfect skipping stone and then kept it in his pocket, refusing to skip it across the water for fear that he would lose it forever- that he would flick his wrist too quickly and it would hit the water at the wrong angle and it wouldn’t make it across to the other bank. It was over-earnest and pathetic in its heavy-handed symbolism, but I wasn’t content to end it there: I named it “A Fable for Amy” before turning it in to my teacher, who commented that it didn’t technically meet the requirements of the assignment (the instructions had been to write a fable; my piece was more of an allegory or parable).
I must have been just as transparent in my direct dealings with Amy. I bought a cassette tape by the 70’s soft rock country outfit Pure Prairie League and learned to pound out their hit “Amie” on my dad’s classical guitar. When I played it for her one summer- the only song I could strum and sing simultaneously- I lied and said that I’d “just always really liked it.” In the weekly letters I sent her over the span of three years, I wrote about school and music and books I was reading and what passed, in grades ten through twelve, for philosophy; but it must have been obvious when I was writing those things that I was in love with her.
It didn’t seem to work the other way; she could send me ten-page letters detailing emotions she shared with no other human being, and it never occurred to me that they were any more than a way to occupy herself for an hour or two. Still, I treasured them. My heart soared when an envelope would arrive with her name on the corner (a simply flawless name, I thought- the seven letters hung in the air like a telephone number, the triangles of the A and the Y and the K achieving a precarious balance). One in particular I kept folded in my back pocket for weeks before it succumbed to the elements and was no longer legible. In that letter she had asked me, in jest, if I would marry her. My heart answered so loudly in the affirmative that I had to make certain I was alone whenever I reread it. And I reread it a thousand times before it disintegrated.
When I did meet the woman who would be my wife, I threw away a Swisher cigar box full of Amy’s letters- most from those days of occasional meetings at Gwinnett Place, before first kisses and telephone confessions and our disastrous attempt at a love affair. Our written correspondence dwindled once driver’s licenses and hand-me-down cars made seeing each other a reality. I could tell you about senior prom and graduation and all that happened during the summer of 1996, and it would likely make for a better story, but to me, my first love lived and died in that cigar box.
It occurred to me, as I carried the tiny casket down my parents’ driveway to the garbage bin, that the pages it contained numbered more than the pages of any diary I’d ever kept, any story I’d ever written- and then it occurred to me that, somewhere on the other side of the Gwinnett Place Mall, the complete narrative of my adolescence was in the possession of a person I no longer knew, entombed in a cigar box or wrapped in a flesh-colored rubber band. I wondered if it pained her as much to part with my letters.
And I wonder now if I haunt her from time to time in her dreams, if the tiled emptiness between Claire’s Boutique and Waldenbooks is simply neutral ground once again between my world and hers. It’s a good feeling when I see her again; we are silent for the most part, and now and again we accidentally brush each other’s sleeve as we reach toward the same item on a book shelf or shift the straw in our drink. It is a warm place, the mall. And then we’re gone.
Perhaps this is the way Amy remembers me. I hope so. I like to think so. Maybe, when she leaves, it is to return to her home and her bed on the other side of sleep, and maybe when she gets there, she rolls over and slides her arm around a kind and steadfast man who has done nothing to earn comparison to the awkward fifteen-year-old boy who lurks in her subconscious. It’s unfair, really. But this man, who I can’t help but imagine to be a fan of seventies soft rock country, has the game-changing advantage of being real.
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