A Letter to a Friend

It’s been 3 days and I’m still waiting for the punchline.

Maybe the joke got botched, maybe it wasn’t funny to begin with, but there would be a punchline nonetheless.  The punchline doesn’t even have to make sense.  Sense is overrated anyhow.  But that often happens when someone so smart is telling the joke; the rest of us can’t understand it.

I suspect it would come from another country.  Qatar, Germany, Jamaica, doesn’t matter.  As long as the punchline came.  Probably in the form of a postcard, or an e-mail.  The last thing you sent seemed to come from an iPhone.  Always some new gadget, eh?  I never understood how you could drive some clunker to California to abandon it, yet always had the new gadget.

But there I go looking to find some sense again.  As if it’s going to help.  As if there’s something to figure out, something the rest of us can grab onto and use to understand why things turned out like this.  It can’t possibly be that you just wanted out that quick that badly?  That makes too much sense.

It’s more fun thinking that the postcard or e-mail will come and the genius will have fooled everyone.  Faked it all for whatever reason.  I wouldn’t even be mad.  It would be great.  I’d still think you were bat-shit crazy, but I’d laugh along with you.

And if I’m wrong, and you could never read this, the person I remember would probably find me trying to make sense of this awfully amusing.  How ridiculous that I would think the whole time you were ready to spring a practical joke-trap, like Noah hiding behind those giant, heavy green couches. Ready to unleash the rapid, clawless paw barrage on the unsuspecting passerby. Sudden, scary, but in the end comically harmless.

But hell, we never seem to look at anything the same way anyhow.  It’s why being your friend has been so much fun.

So I’ll just keep hoping for the postcard.  Or the next time I’m in the obx, you can just walk out of the water, with a pipe and a cup of coffee, while the usual depressing ass music you enjoy so much is playing.

It would be a great punchline.  And we’d all be a hell of a lot happier than this.