The Messenger

Several months ago, a girl I went to high school with (but never interacted with) contacted me via myspace.com. She acknowledged the fact that we weren't friends back then, but added, "so what! we both live in brooklyn now. we should hang out."

Last night we finally were able to meet up at a bar in the Lower East Side.

She had kept saying we should catch up. Since I don't remember anything about her, I didn't think there'd be much catching up to do. And there wasn't. Aside from going to school together and now living in Brooklyn, we didn't have much in common. What we did was tenuous. We talked about tattoos for awhile. She has them, I work on a televiion show about them. Each of us kept bringing up old names of people we knew in high school and we both drew blanks at each others' remembrances. We were from two different worlds.

But I did walk away from our encounter with some important information.

One of the first things she said, as I sat at the bar, was, "When I think of you back then, I think of Aaron Parsons." (That is not his real name, in case you are wondering. I've decided to change it to protect the innocent.)

Aaron Parsons was one of my best friends growing up. We had been pals since kindergarten. Our parents would tell us about parent-teacher meetings with our kindergarten teacher, who was at a loss as to how she could control us. We apparently took control of our kindergarten class every morning by clowning around and entertaining the other kids. This was something we continued to do throughout our schooling. By the time we had reached high school we had started making videos of our shenanigans. Aaron was my partner in comedy growing up. He had one of the most fertile imaginations of anyone I've ever known. And he was goddamn funny. Always.

"Am I wrong in thinking that?" the girl I had met at the bar said. I explained that she was correct. We were good friends. I went on to explain that I had lost track of him in 1999 and have been thinking about looking him up.

"I saw him last month,"she said.

"No shit?"

""His family is good friends with mine. His parents and mine went to Hawaii together last month," she continued. She explained that Aaron has been living at his parents' for the last six months.

"He's a little...odd...isn't he?"

Aaron was always a little over the top. Like Robin Williams. He had a lot of energy, as I remembered. "I guess he is," I chuckled.

She explained that he had disappeared for three years.

What?! Apparently I wasn't the only one wondering where he was. So were his parents and siblings. His brother got married three years ago and Aaron never showed up. And no one ever heard from him. He just dropped off the face of the earth. Until six months ago.

She told me that one night his parents came home from a trip and there he was sitting on their porch. He's been living with them ever since.

As odd as the story is, I was excited to know that he is around. More importantly, I now know where he is.

We kept talking about high school stuff. She had gone to the ten year reunion a few years ago and talked about how lame it was, and told me about her job as a teacher, and what she's been doing with herself, and I told her what i've been doing, but the whole time I wanted to go home and call my old childhood friend and ask him how he's been and tell him that I've missed him.

I think I will do that later today. He's obviously got some stories to tell.