Linda, and a July 29, 1987 greeting card

Aida once told me that communicating with a friend who you loved was so good that you just wanted to "inhale" him or her. Since childhood, that was how I felt about a few of the children of my father's booze buddies. Being with them wasn't just a matter of passing the time, it provided a sense of completion in those moments which was otherwise absent from my life.

Linda was one of those types of friends for me for several years. She and I did more sleepovers than any of my other friends and I remember setting up a small tent and camping out in our front yard so we could giggle and talk well past our bed time. We had also had an experience during one of her previous nights spent at my house which encouraged us to get out of the house.

My parents had come home drunk and noisily had sex while Linda was there. We were watching T.V., but it couldn't drown out their squeaky bed. Afterwards, my mother came downstairs and asked me to remove a splinter she'd somehow gotten into her toe. Linda tried to suppress her titters as my mother slurred her words and remained oblivious to just how much we'd (unwillingly) overheard. Both of my parents were too dull and self-absorbed to think about how they may have just embarrassed themselves when a guest was in our home.

When we were teens, we used to spend hours at the mall in the biggest nearby town. This was when arcade games were a big deal and we'd waste a lot of quarters playing "Space Invaders" or "Dig Dug". When Linda ran out of money, I promised her a dollar more to continue playing if she'd pick up a bunch of random flyers lying in a pile on a bench and hand them out to people. She gamely did so until the stupid joke wore thin and I gave her the cash. As we walked back to the arcade, we saw a scattered pile of the same flyers on a distant bench where people who'd taken them from her abandoned them once out of sight and we both burst out laughing.

Linda's family rowed in the same socioeconomic boat as mine so she wasn't as put off by the squalor we lived in. I knew that she didn't spread our (literally) dirty secrets as some other kids did after seeing how we lived. She was also the only person who I knew who defended me in school when other kids made fun of me.

Linda was two years younger than me and said that, one day while my class was outside playing softball during gym, hers was sitting in an English class. I was horrible at sports due to my weight and Linda told me that the other kids in the room were laughing at me as they watched from a distance as I struggled to hit the ball and run to bases. She told me that the English teacher told them to cut it out and that I was smarter than them and read books. He said that they would do well to follow my example. I think Linda told me this to make me feel better, but it only further clued me in on the fact that I was being mocked and bullied not only by the kids on the bus and in my grade, but by the whole school.

As the years went by and I went to college, lost weight, and got a job far from home, Linda and I saw each other less and less. I tried to hold the friendship together, but she became too busy with her own life. After she married my class's biggest loser and had a baby, she didn't have time to spend with me. It wouldn't be accurate to say we grew apart, but our lives did.

Linda was the last in-person friend from my hometown who I "inhaled." Then, Tito came along, and I could draw him in day and night, and I did. When a fresh supply of tapes showed up in my mailbox, I was filled with joy. When the mailbox was empty, I played the old ones again and again. He was the air I breathed and provided a sense of completion found in another person that I hadn't had since childhood. This happened even before we got into our long distance relationship, and this was something I tried to communicate in the card pictured with this post.