“Remember everything,” she said. “Everything anyone says to you, remember it.”

She had no idea I was already doing this, the catalogs I had of her words in my mind.

“I can remember being young and staring at my toes. All I could think was, ‘I just want to remember what my toes look like at this very moment’. I still have that image in my mind of them.”

I feel like I can’t remember anything. Childhood memories come in fragments and blurs. I’m not even sure if some of them are real. I look at her and I want to write a million things. I’m filled with stories. I want to write about her, her life. Even if its all a lie. She still makes up better things than I could ever dream. But this is just like me. To latch on and feed. Because I want a life changing event so bad.

“I feel like it just won’t come,” I say.

“You’re young,” she says. “You have your whole life left ahead of you. This is your prime. You’re going to be my age and wonder what happened.”

She’s not easy to reach. I never know when I’m going to see her. I never know when she’ll come in. She gave me her number a couple of times. She prefaced it by saying that her meth head roommate had access to the phone. She told me to leave her a message with no specifics and she’d call me back. She said the little he knew about me the better. Her stories were always crazy like this. Always making me wonder if I should get tangled up in her life. But I wanted to reach out to her, scared of the day I’d never see her again. Leaving our story unfinished, never knowing her purpose in my life. She has to have one.