part of a short story...
Write about a time you changed your mind.
Eric sat across the old wooden table from me, studiously reading a guitar magazine. I was there mostly just to keep him company. I looked down at the table, noticing some of the phrases and proclamations that people had carved into its rough, brown surface. There was the traditional “So-and-so loves so-and-so” and, of course, “Fuck you,” along with some uncommon quotes and statements. I felt like adding my own generic “life sucks.”
Eric shifted in his seat and closed the magazine, slapping it down on the table with a sigh.
“I’ll never be as good as these guys,” he said, indicating the various musicians and singers on the cover.
“Not with that attitude, anyway,” I shot back. He sometimes sunk into these depressive states of self-doubt and it was my appointed duty to pull him out.
“Thanks for the support,” he quipped sarcastically.
“Well, you won’t. If you don’t believe enough in yourself and your talent, then you’re right, you won’t be any good,” I replied matter-of-factly, shrugging my shoulders.
“How could I possibly compete with the likes of these guys?” he asked, his voice rising a bit. I was becoming exasperated with him.
“For the love of God, Eric, would you stop! Just quit doubting yourself. Quit comparing yourself to other people. You’re talented, you know it.”
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. He had a smirk on his thin lips and his eyes seemed to be lit with a fire.
“Hey, don’t get to cocky over there, pal,” I cautioned. “You’ve still got to get up on stage and perform in front of all those strangers.”
“Yeah, but as long as I’ve got you there for support, I’ll be okay.” He gathered his backpack and guitar case from the chair next to him and stood up. I grabbed my messenger bag and hung it over my shoulder. We walked out of the bookstore to my car, an old, beat-up, red Ford Escort.
Once inside the car, he took control over the radio. Usually, that annoyed me. Today, though, I had other things on my mind. If he thought he was nervous about his impending performance, he had no idea of the terror I held on his behalf.
When he had begun his obsession with playing the guitar eight years before, I figured it would be a short-lived hobby at best. But he kept at it, immersing himself in guitar playing. He listened to everyone from Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix to Joe Satriani and B.B. King. He grew so attached to his second-hand electric and acoustic guitars that he’d sleep with them right next to his bed, practicing from the time he woke up in the morning to until he went to sleep at night. It got so he could listen to a piece of music a few times and then could play it perfectly.
For the longest time, everybody wrote Eric off. They all said he would grow out of playing the guitar so much, that it was just a phase. After my initial period of feeling the same doubt, my opinion differed from theirs. When he played me the first song he’d written, something basic and pretty generic, I knew he wouldn’t give it up. I was skeptical at the beginning, but now here I was, eight years later, anxious over his first real public performance.
In many ways, Eric was a typical 19 year-old. He loved movies and music, played games on his Play Station almost religiously until he beat them. But in a lot of other ways, he was different from everybody else, too. He could, of course, play the guitar like nobody’s business. He was also smarter than anybody I knew, with a vocabulary that baffled me. Half of the time he used words in conversation with me that I had no idea what they meant, and I’d have to go home and look up their definitions in the dictionary afterwards.
My belief in Eric’s budding music career wasn’t the only thing that changed for me. We’d been friends since diapers and I had shied away from a lot of kids our age to be a tomboy with him. At a certain point, I wasn’t sure when, my feelings for him changed. I found myself more attracted to him and moved by his talent and dedication to his music. Of course, the fact that he shared with me a song that he wrote about me did nothing except increase my feelings for him exponentially.
Even though I felt that strongly about him, I never told him. I’d come pretty close a few times, but I’d always chicken out when it came right down to it. Now, I doubted if he even knew my true feelings.
(Post a new comment)
(Post a new comment)
|
