Practically Magic

In the year 2000, I got my first apartment at the age of twenty with Melissa, a girl who worked at an Italian restaurant. She was a few years older than me and had a fun outgoing personality, the kind that made you want to be spontaneous and adventurous.

Her back sported a tattoo of a dog wearing a confederate flag. Oh--and she had once been a stripper.

I was just on the eve of having my first serious relationship, I was in college, I worked at Border's Books--you get the picture, we were different.

I'm pretty sure she was an alcoholic with big emotional problems (think faked miscarriage) but she did mean well and was a loyal friend--except for taking off with the apartment deposit money a year later.

She introduced me to people who were unlike any of my other friends back home in suburbia and I had life changing experiences during the time we lived together--some good (think best night of your young life mixed with euphoria and the giggles) and some ugly (think sobbing on the floor, mascara running down your face).

She once told me a story about how the owner of the strip club she worked at had been slow dancing with his wife to Prince's "Little Red Corvette," when someone came into the club and fired shots, killing his wife.
Who has stories like that? I thought that only happened in the movies. She could have been lying but I heard her tell the story on multiple occasions.

She took me to my first strip club, and I don't remember anything because I was three sheets to the wind (always wondered where that saying came from). The one thing I do remember was a Russian man asking me to come to his car--pretty sure I dodged a bullet there.

For those of you who have seen the movie Practical Magic, you will remember a scene where they have Midnight Margaritas. That was the kind of things she made me do, only hers were combined with running through the sprinklers. She was the Gillian Owens--sexual, daring and rebellious, to my Sally Owens-- practical, reserved, and cautious.

I learned a lot from my experiences with her and that life we created in our little Sacramento apartment. She made me push my comfort levels and try new things. She also got me to pick up smoking menthol cigarettes, a short lived experience, and the worse hangover to date. It was one of those times in life that seemed magical, but was pretty dark.

I found her on Myspace years ago and she apologized for the things that happened but when I wrote her back she never responded. She had a boyfriend or husband, not sure, and a baby girl. I just checked my old Myspace account and her last name has been changed and she lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I doubt her kid(s) even have a clue about half of the things she's done in life--which probably goes for the majority of us. Her stories give the term "a misspent youth" a whole new meaning.

In retrospect there are many things she guided me through; valuable life lessons that you can only learn by doing and experiencing. As dysfunctional as we may have looked from the outside or in hindsight, we were just what the other needed at that time in our lives. There's a reason opposites attract--she helped coax out my inner siren and I calmed the chaotic seas inside her.

Don't be afraid to take the path less traveled my friends, and always put the lime in the coconut and drink them both up.