The persistence of memory

I was drunk by this point. Good drunk. The kind where you look in the mirror to see a gleam in your eye, and you think “You’re doing great champ. The life decisions you’ve made to this point are really paying off. Yessir.”

Outside, it was in typical Seattle fashion, dark, wet and boozy on this particular Thursday night. Earlier, we’d hit all the friendly neighborhood hipster haunts and had landed at the queen of them all. Where deer heads and other species hang on the wall observing the creatures below them.

This is where I saw a girl. She was seated at a booth with two gents who clearly, in the words of my former business associate “pounded each-other yeah?”

Check what I said earlier. I was very drunk by this point. So drunk that the leftover glasses of booze sitting on the table we’d scavenged looked like a good idea. Yet another good life decision made. Gulp Gulp.

When you’re this drunk, tunes are needed. This is a must. So I headed to the juke, where I dropped in the change and that’s when the girl walked by. So I grabbed her.

“Hey. Help me out with this”

This being the selections on the jukebox. She agreed way too easily. And we picked songs. I don’t remember what they were, but I’m pretty sure one of the gents she was sitting with joined the fun.

Let me just stop here for a little philosophical interlude. Some will say that we are the product of our experiences, our memories, our decisions. If we don’t learn from them, many times we keep doing the same thing.

I pulled up next to the girl and the gents in their booth, with the second glass of leftover booze from the table I was at. My business associate joined, all 6’10” of him folded into a booth, where he began to question the two gents about their sexual practices. I took this as a cue to step outside with the lady for a sexy cigarette.

“So what’s your name?”

“Liz.”

“Hmm, and where are you from?”

“Grand Rapids, Minnesota.”

“That’s so weird, I know this girl who is also from Grand Rapids, and her name is Liz.”

“Yeah…”

“Yeah, incredible. You know, you look like her too.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, totally.”

We headed back inside for more booze and discourse. And over the course of the evening, as I sat next to this lady, I had visions of us in the future, attending various social functions, discussing topics, it was lovely.

Then the two gents got into a fight over my business associate’s shoes. The two were arguing about exactly how out of fashion the shoes were. Consensus at the table was that the shoes were in fact out of style, but for these two, the question was in exactly what order of magnitude did my business associate’s folly lie. It got ugly, so bad that the “bottom” of the two left the bar in tears.

I took this as an opportunity to ask for the girl’s phone number. She looked at me for a second, eyebrows raised, then decided to play along.

As I punched in the numbers, something amazing happened. That number was already in my phone! Along with this girl’s name!

“And look, there it is!”

She was not amused. “Uh Huh.”

And then all the wheels started turning in my head. Seattle is not that big of a town. Grand Rapids Minnesota is an even smaller town. The possibilities of there being two Liz’s from Grand Rapids living in Capitol Hill are astronomical. She was the same Liz.

She was the same liz who I’d already gone out with before. She was the same liz who, on our first date freely divulged to me that she was divorced. She who also confessed that she had been born 7^th Day Adventist. And had admitted that the marriage was a religious one. And had lived on a compound in Southern California.

How could I forget?

I got a text from her later that night.

“So were you fucking with me tonight?”

I wish I was Liz, I wish I was.

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