Unannounced

Finished on Wednesday, October 31, 2007.

Mindy was one or the other… the quiet, somewhat distracted, teenager unnoticed in the back of the class or the lanky ball of chaotic energy that would burst through doors and disrupt assemblies with a loud and obnoxious laugh; wallpaper or bull in a china shop. It seemed as if all that energy could only be channeled in sports. She excelled at field hockey, lacrosse and ice hockey because she rammed into players of the opposing team with the force of three grown men, scoring with impeccable aim. No one would have guessed that the clumsy pale girl was the player to fear, especially because she was always greeting everyone in such a friendly manner. Mindy was not a good student. I think she enjoyed learning, but loved making friends and just being a clown. She was adopted by the girls in the older grades, her sister’s year, who took her to high school parties before any of us knew what was going on. In our class, she seemed to hang out on the margins of every group waiting to include the girls who broke the unspoken social rules and were ostracized from their pack. She was everyone’s friend but had a soft spot for Joan, a serious individual determined to be accepted by the most selective clique in our class. Mindy stayed by her, took her in when the others rejected her valiant efforts, giving her unswerving friendship.

I was shy, and thus watched from a safe distance how relationships where built upon commonalities and crumbled easily because of differences. My Venezuelan background, my accent, my mother’s strictness made me different from the beginning, so in a way I was safe from being accepted and rejected by the people I would have to see day in and day out for consecutive years. Sometimes I was jealous, but mostly thankful that I could always keep my individuality, even at the price of loneliness. I had friends, individual friends, but not a group that would engulf me when I walked the hallways of our all-girl catholic school. I admired those girls who felt at ease talking to everyone, making a temporary friend for a long weekend, or even asking the smarter girls to tutor them on an upcoming exam. I identified with the awkward and shy smart girls who were very willing to please without ever needing to belong to more popular cliques; their lives seemed to be full of family gatherings and extracurricular activities. Mindy was extraordinary in that she was neither, or she was both. Or she was just herself to perfection.

I became friends with Mindy during one of those lonely moments when my Venezuelan roots would not let me fit in, but I was unwilling to cut them for good. She approached me, spoke with comfort and ease, and before I knew it I was spending the weekend at her house. From the moment I took a step into her life I was surprised by the differences between our families. She lived with her mother and older sister and they treated each other like adults. Mindy, in high school, was free to make her own choices and thus live with the consequences. To me, it was a breath of fresh air, and a fact that made it possible for me to comprehend Mindy’s free spirit on a deeper level. Even in the midst of such freedom, Mindy’s priority was making sure her younger siblings (kids from her father’s second marriage) were always ok, speaking about them with limitless love and tenderness, much like a parent. It was this characteristic that made Mindy such a unique person in my mind… she was free-giving.

Someone said to me once that Mindy was not meant to live that long. I waver between thinking that it is but a comforting excuse of an early death or thinking it is actually true. Even in the margins, Mindy suffered, was saddened and disappointed by people who entered and exited her life in the blink of an eye. Her approaches were always sincere, meaningful and pure. She really did want to be friends, and to prove it she would appear at your lowest moment. Classes, sports, friends, boyfriends, etc. always kept Mindy and I on different pages, but at some point we always seemed to get together. Those moments were always filled with laugher, chaos and beauty; she remained from that first moment the deep breath of fresh air that made me smile even when she was not around. Just like she did, her memory barges into my brain unannounced and always leaves me with a sense of being a deeper, better person for knowing her.