Mariah

"You know what your problem is?" Paul told me once. "You get offended too easily." He said this while sitting in the window, one leg dangling 4 stories above the earth. His apartment was covered in the evidence of his inability to stick to one idea. A trumpet behind the couch. A few lack-luster paintings by the door. Half-baked business schemes tacked to the walls. He wasn't so vain as to call himself the last true dreamer, but I'm sure he thought it.
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He was a fixture at the cafés. In heavily accented French, he’d argue useless points about Proust. “Thing is,” he’d tell me. “I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to remember.” He’d come to Paris after the war, but some things were still lost. He preferred them that way.
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Paul had a habit of picking up knick-knacks. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted them, and he certainly didn’t need them, but he liked the way they felt in his pockets. At the end of a long day, he’d empty them, displaying bottle cap necklaces, old keys, a blue marble, and unidentifiable things. He’d tell stories about each one, wild stories without an end—stories like the summers of our childhoods on opposite sides of earth. “Let me tell you ‘bout this guy I knew” they all inevitably started. They all stopped when he started laughing to hard or crying too heavily. But that was Paul, only ever laughing or crying.
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When we heard about Jim Morrison, he did neither. He just got quiet; it was as if he’d just realized his own mortality. He disappeared for a few days. When I found him again, he’d found something too big for his pockets. Paul set it in the middle of the table and stared at it. This strange wooden thing was just that, a thing. More thing than all the other things. Something about it terrified me. “Mais, qu’est-ce que c’est?” I asked him, pointing.
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“This is what I was supposed to remember,” he whispered. “Life just doesn’t make any sense.”
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After that, I never saw Paul again. On the best days, I imagine that he’s found some way to keep dreaming. Other days, I imagine the worst. I tried not to read too much into his disappearance; we were bound to drift apart. I like to think that we knew each other in our best days, but now those were over. Maybe he wouldn’t have liked the person I am now. Maybe I just get offended too easily.