Missing Fran Feb. 7, 1986
I dreamed of Fran last night.
The pain of last year’s break up settles I my chest like a
bad cold, never bad enough to put me in the hospital, but it won’t go away
either.
I keep hoping she’ll come back when I know she won’t.
Not that I really want this consciously, Three years being
with her is a long time, as is the year apart holding hope for a reunion that
can’t possibly take place.
I have to come to accept that she is a hippie, someone who
clings to an already outdated belief system I long ago abandoned for something
more practical.
But as much as Fran is an advocate for all that peace and
love stuff of the 1960s, she is also an extremely angry person, capable of
exploding in rage, a five-foot-tall bundle of dynamite that at times has scared
the shit out of me.
At times, she comes across as a little girl, full of a
little girl’s passion, and full of little girl’s pain, while at other times,
she is the most adult person I know.
Some meanspirited people claim she looked like John and Yoko
combined, which means to call her “pretty” would be a gross overstatement.
She is capable of absorbing you whole; so that you either
love her or hate her or feel nothing at all.
She tends to fold herself up when relaxed, as if she was capable
of folding herself up completely like a folding chair. She often sat like that
when a passenger in a car, as if ready to chant.
When not otherwise engaged, she seemed curious about
everything, bearing an expression of wonderment, poking her small nose into
everything, yet at times seemingly as innocent as a deer.
She always dresses for outdoors, sturdy hiking boots, a
green down vest, thick wool sweaters, stiff jeans.
She always walks like a gun fighter, each foot with toes
pointed slightly outward.
Her dark eyes were always wide open, camera lenses taking in
everything around her, keeping a picture of the world she would later recall
for her art, always alert to the not-so-obvious things, the fragile things
other people would never notice.
Her smile was a curious uncertain thing, lifting slightly at
the edges, although mostly her lips formed a straight, determined line across
the lower portion of her face, compressing when upset, hurt or angry, quivering
when very hurt.
Her life has been a string of betrayals, starting when her
mother left, leaving her and her brother in the care of a not-so-stable father,
who raised her to find her own way in the world. If climbing roofs was her
thing, he let her do it, provided she didn’t get hurt in the process.
When she was fourteen, she hooked up with an older man not
much different from her father, a man in his early 20s whose wife has just
split, a man who wanted her to dress up, making her wear make up and garters, a
man who took nude sex pictures of her, threatening to spread them around if she
ever left him.
This situation brought Fran’s mother back into the picture,
taking her and her brother out to Texas, and only her father’s heart attack
could make her come back here.
Fran always had men around her, many of whom wanted to
protect her, two of whom shot themselves, both with the same gun in the same
room six months apart. Another of her suicidal friends ran his truck smack into
a concrete wall just prior to our breaking up in late 1984, and I got scared
she might do something nearly as foolish when we broke up, but she didn’t.
She looked just the same as always when I saw her last month
wandering around Clifton, the same clothing, the same expression, the same
strut, the same child-like soul disguisedas an adult.
God, how I miss her.
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