every new beginning comes with some other beginning's end...

Where to start, where to start.

It seems like the more into "blogger territory" I traverse (i.e., making comments on other blogs), the more I find it easier to stay with my original scheme: write what I want, respond to what I want, but mostly WRITE and feel like I might have an audience.

Here I am again, needing for my temp agency to call me about another job, and on break from teaching till Friday. I don't have enough time to really sit and marinate on any of the writing projects I'm working on, but I'm definitely itching to set thoughts down....

This past weekend was crazy - especially since I intended for it to be relaxing and borderline-bummy. It was my first weekend 95% healthy, and I wanted to get home on Friday night, relax after a long day, wake up early on Saturday, jog a couple of laps at the park, then go to work and write write write with the kids. I completely intended to go back to the park after work, lie in the grass with Cloudsplitter, finally finish the book, then write a little bit more, maybe meet someone for a drink or a meal, then order in some delicious take-out (curry and roti?! mmmmMmmmmmmMmmm), and spend some time with the family. Throw in some candlelit yoga on Sunday and maybe meeting a friend or two for brunch and a brisk walk in the park, and that woulda been SUPER. Really, it would've.

Instead, Flower Power called me up on Friday afternoon - and what could've been a relaxing weekend doing absolutey nothing became... well... the typical craziness of hanging out with Flo - despite the fact that I didn't really hang out with Flo.

Flo is one of those women who completely EXUDES confidence and sexuality. She's the only girl in a brood of six children, has a presence that landed her a couple of cameos on TV and a Guess? ad in the late 90s, and she's gorgeous. She's gorgeous and loud in the way that men always smile at and women always suck their teeth at. And I owe so much to her.

I might never have become the woman I am now if not for Flo. She and another friend, VT (VT died when I was nine or ten) were the first strong, independent women to take an interest in my well being. They let me watch as they lived their lives, and never let me feel ashamed for being a fly on the wall. I could never keep up with the quick pace of Flo's life, and when I saw her on Friday, it felt like I was coming full-circle and meeting the woman I'd subconsciously modeled myself after.

Flo was sixteen when she started modeling and promptly got her GED. She'd always been rough-and-tumble, always with a quick mouth and a sharp wit - but she'd also been smart. She'd sooner talk her way out of a tight jam, but wouldn't hesitate to draw some blood if that's what it came down to. And gorgeous - oh God, was she gorgeous... I remember being fifteen or sixteen years old, and her younger brother, Carlos (who was my best friend for many years) would regail me with tales about Flo's adventures. She fucked only models (and men who could've been models), flew in private jets, sailed in yaughts, backpacked through Europe. She had grown up speaking Spanish, English, and ebonics, and had had the foresight to also pick up proper grammar along the way - but she managed to learn Italian and pick up some French and Portuguese while overseas. She invested her money wisely, bought extravagant things for herself only if she was sure that she could either give them away later as presents or that they'd become collectables, and she loved with all her might.

Now in her early 30s, Flo is what I want to be at her age. She studied anthropology in France, lived with a bevy of handsome men, settled down with a woman (they had a child together), then separated from her wife after being cheated on. Now newly single and very experienced, she is very much free and her own woman. But gorgeous - oh man, is she gorgeous as ever!

When I met her on Friday night in the Lower East Side wine bar, all eyes fell on the statuesque beauty that I seated myself in front of. She feigned ignorance of this fact and graciously smiled when she saw me. Men coughed so they could turn away from their dates and steal glances of her. Women either smiled lasciviously or sneered at her. And yet her entire attention was lavished on me. Me, who in my flats, could be no more than 5'6". It felt in that moment like I was in the cast of the most all-engrossing fairy tale to ever be realized.

"I was gonna cut you if I found out you changed your number without telling me!" she said, not missing a beat.

I laughed and screamed, I was so excited to hear her voice and see her in person.

The sedate wine bar tensed and shirked at my shriek.

Flo's voice was the same street-smart cadence of Puerto Rican-Brooklynite that I remembered.

"Me?!" I countered, incredulous. "I called you like four years ago, and your number was disconnected!"

"Why didn't you call my folks?"

I hesitated, hating the feeling of being grilled by so close a friend.

Flo laughed. "I know, I know. It's hard talking to them..."

If it had been any other time, I would have felt dwarfed next to Flo. Not only is she a full five inches taller than me, but she is one of those women who looks positively air-brushed the moment she wakes up. (Granted, of course, that a lot of the times I saw her upon waking up were after long nights of partying, and she'd slept in her make-up, but still...) She'd cut her hair into a short boy-cut, she said, and was now growing it out. It was dark brown, with light brown highlights, and her choppy-wavy layers accentuated her high cheek bones and perfect bone structure. She'd permed it while waiting for it to grow out, so that the tight, big curls looked forced and exaggerated, making her look like she'd just walked off the runway of some haute couture fashion show.

When we hugged, I quickly noticed just how different the actual woman looked from my memory: The tight curves of her body looked positively elegant in a full-length, wine-colored cashmere column dress, and a black pashmina draped effortlessly along her shoulders. Even her sparse jewelry selections - flawless diamond studs in her ears and the noticeable but unobnoxious diamond bangles adorning her wrists - seemed contrary to the around-the-way-girl rocking the latest Pumas and Tommy Hilfiger bubble jacket.

But that voice, that attitude, that va-va-voom that got the boys from Bay Ridge to the Grand Councourse drooling - it was all still there. Despite everything she'd been through, she was still Flo.

After two bottles of wine at the wine bar, and a short walk to Little Italy for gelato, three hours had passed and I'd gotten a text from a new teacher-friend that I've been partying it up with, Groovy Girl. Flo and I had wound our way around our shared past, as if to compare notes. Two of her brothers have passed away, one of them is in jail, one is a family man in upstate NY, and another is still running around the barrio chasing skirts. [Flo: "I can't believe you dated all of them." Me: "I didn't date all of them!" Flo: (laughing so hard her body is convulsing) "Oh. My bad. You just fucked all of them! - Except the gay one!" Me: (laughing as hard as she's laughing): "Yeah! But not for a lack of trying! Carlos was fiiinnneee." Flo: "Stop talking about my fine-ass dead gay brother!"] Her parents have recently retired and moved to Miami [Flo: "I told Pa, I said 'See? You got so mad when I was showing my goodies in ads, but you wouldn't be watching half-naked young girls fraw-licking on the beach all day if I wasn't spending my younger days half-naked! It's the circle of life!' (busting out in full Lion King mode)The ciiiircclle of Life!"]. And Flo's decided to buy some property on the east coast while the market is good [Flo: "You know what a buyer's market is, mija? It's when the economy is so fucked that even good, moral people like myself take advantage of the fact that none of the poor folk can pay their bills, so I buy their property right from under them."]

Her younger brother, Carlos, had been the real-life rendition of the My So-Called Life character, Rickie - but with a lot more bite to his bark. I had been drawn to Carlos like a moth to a flame: he was gorgeous, and passionate, and could dress like a mofo. He had talent for the arts, could dance circles around anyone and had a knack for getting me into trouble and then bailing me out. Looking back, I'm pretty sure I was a little in love with him - even if he was gay, and man, was he gay! Carlos was gay before I even knew what gay was, and though it didn't sit well with his folks, he didn't go through the usual growing pains of angsty adolescence. Maybe it was because he had his big sister, Flo, to back him up; or maybe some of that patented Puertoriquena attitude rubbed off on the two youngest kids of the fam, but Carlos worked it. At eleven years old, I'm not sure I fully grasped what it meant to "work it" - until I saw Carlos wearing his purple and black Perry Ellis suit. (Yeah, I had to bring it back...)

Flo was the cool older sister, to whom Carlos and I would tell all of our secrets, in the hope that she would deem us worthy of shared escapades. She taught us how to measure an ounce of bud, introduced us to very unsavory Italian characters, and got us into clubs with more coke than Coke.

Flo was the be-all-and-end-all of cool, and looking back, I realize that the 2 or 3 years we had bad blood was all just a test; I had to endure the pangs of being without this ghetto goddess as my saving grace. She had to make due with saying things like, "You're either stupid or you think I'm stupid," to some unsuspecting hood, and not have me and Carlos finish with her famous tag phrase, "And I know you don't think I'm stupid."

Even though I was more a voyeur than a participant in those adventures, it was all part of my becoming me, and it was enough for me to get a contact high.



Friday night. There I was. Sitting across from Ms. World-Traveler-Been-There-Done-That Matching her stories with stories of my own. I was talking about picking up after high school and driving along the east coast. I was remembering the union organizers I met in North Carolina and the Navy boys I met in Virginia, the fishermen in Florida and the wanna-be cowboys in Texas... And Ms. All-Perfect-And-All-Experienced was laughing and nodding her head and fully immersed in everything that I'd done and been and become.

Groovy Girl was inviting me out to Williamsburg to a B-Boy battle that she hoped to win, and I texted her back that a friend from high school had invited me to it weeks before. Flo nodded her head while paying the bill and looked at me like I was crazy when I reached for my wallet. "Mija, you're either stupid or you think I'm stupid," she said, lowering her gaze at me, "And we both know you're not stupid."

In the old days, she would've said, "And I know you don't think I'm stupid" - but there it was: Verification of my coolness. Validation. Victory.

We hugged and cried and promised to talk in the near future. I walked away, toward the L train, and called her parents in Miami. I got the answering machine, and left a message saying that I miss them and I love them and I hope they're doing well. And just as me and my cell phone were sinking deeper into the subway, I got a call from Flo.

"Maria?"

"Yeah?"

"I hope you don't mind me calling you mija. It's just so deeply engrained in me, ya know, from back in the day. I was walking away and rethinking our conversation and I didn't want you to think that I still think of you as that awkward 11-year old girl..."

"I know you don't," I said with a smile that permeated the phone waves.

"Good," Flo said, feeling me smile.

We hung up and I joined my friend in Williamsburg, and even though I know I'm probably not going to talk to Flo again for another 4 or 5 years, it doesn't feel like we lied to each other about talking soon. I'd smiled and she'd smiled, and somewhere in there was a lot of deeper meaning that words could never begin to describe.