Curls

So last Saturday was St. Pat's, and also my Pop's B-day, and after days of feeling horribly ill and hawking up blood, I was as down as a depressed beetle under the boot of suicidal hobo.
That is until the ever-enchanting Helga showed up with two Guinness's for poor little me, along with some much needed ego-stroking and silly fun happiness.
The thing about Helga is she can be just a tad overwhelming. So affectionate, so gung-ho to the party scene, so energized by beer, and oh-so-incredibly-hot that she has no problem what so ever bending mere mortals like myself to her Demi-goddes will.
Which is how despite my best intentions, she wound up hauling my sick little tooshy down to Boston (a kinda Indy/Artsy bar in Rvk) through the cold and rain.
We get to the bar and La Petite Croissant does her bar-butterfly thing, flitting about kissing cheeks and generally charming the undies off of everyone she meets, while I, now sickly sober and feeling like ass, stand and check out the room full of cuties I know I won't be flirting with that night. Ran into the lovely Ursula, she of the perennial flirtation from Switzerland, chatted a bit. She gets a big thanks for me for responding with "that's great!" when I finally told her where I work. The usual response to someone finding out I'm and Increased Income Facilitator is "They let you work with children?!?!"
But I must admit, the whole time I was there, I was distracted by this dark-haired brown-eyed girl with a ragamuffin outfit and sly little smile chatting with some friends at another table.
This would be my first Icelandic girlfriend "Curly" (long story that).
We haven't talked for years, in fact, the last time I saw her I was hobbling home on crutches (bum knee) rather heroically pissed, when she, rather remarkably heroically pissed, ran up to me on Laugarvegur laughing like a maniac, kicked the crutch out from under me, fell on her ass, and ran off with her friends.
Previous to that, she'd made "distant" into an entertaining little understatement, she'd literally pretend I wasn't there if we happened to meet, cross the street in traffic to avoid me, or Embla, or Anna, or any of the crowd from the exchange student days.
Back in the day, we had an odd little relationship. Not passionate, but full of strange little dramas. We were both very young, very inexperienced, very full of ourselves.
I was naive and over enthusiastic, manic with the possibilities that my exchange trip had opened me up to, pretentious with my teen aged ego, and completely smitten with her.
She was damaged, wildly eccentric, armored in pretense and cynicism, creative, and wild.
We talked about art and music, created our own pigeon language of references and weird catch phrases ("pots alot" "fog chickens" and "south of France pants" for instance) so much so that we drove our mutual friends insane. She introduced me to Leonard Cohen, which I'll be forever grateful for.
We planned to Euro rail around the continent when my exchange year was up. I would be a writer, a poet, she'd paint, we'd drink red wine in cafes and learn better French. We walked in the rain, kissed at bus stops, wandered Rvk looking at old houses (except for certain neighborhoods, which she absolutely refused to walk through, citing the fog chickens as her reason for avoidance) and being artsy.
It never worked out. When I went home, drama of a scale that forbids me from discussing it raised its head, and the dream was over. We stayed friends for a few years, until one return trip to Iceland, having gone to meet her in a cafe, I said something that offended her, something about art, and we haven't spoken since.
I hear through the grapevine that she's married now. Lives in Sweden, works in sculpture, has a kid. Good for her.
Even though she snubs me, even though it all went really really wrong, she remains the biggest "what if" in the life of the Sma. I think about her from time to time. Not in an obsessive sort of way, but with a melancholy mixture of regret and remembrance.
For her part, well, the most I can hope for is that (with apologies to Mr. Cohen) she remembers me well in the Chelsea Hotel, but that's all she just don't think of me that often...