Posters I Have Had

I

One day the phone rang in the kitchen with the avocado oven and it was the dead boy. He wanted to know if I had the schedule for the local movie theatre. I was not used to talking to boys on the phone, especially not dead boys with soft blonde hair the colour of ripe wheat. I didn't know what to say. I think I snickered inappropriately. It was all wrong. I wish he'd phone again now so I could tell him how much his mother grieved for him. I wish we could have skated on the ice together at twilight, making snow angels by the side of the rink with a sky for a ceiling and marveled at those pin prick stars, the way stars used to be before I had to wear glasses and they never looked the same again. I wish I could share with him my sadness about the way the stars have changed. Maybe then I wouldn't have been driven mad by the need to tell someone about those sorts of things. But his death wasn't about me and my isolation sickness, it was about him and how we lost him on a flat prairie gravel road.

II

I had a poster of John Travolta in my bedroom. He was wearing an intensely blue shirt which brought out the blue of his eyes. I wasn't even a big Travolta fan, but the colours in the poster cheered me up. I also had a life-sized poster of Shaun Cassidy on my bedroom door, but it wasn't really life-sized because I could reach his lips no problem, which was fine by me. I also had a picture of a kitten that said, "Hang in There!" and a poster of a rainbow with a quote from Tennyson's Ulysses:

 I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world,
whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

I still love that quote. Shaun Cassidy? Not so much.
And I'm still hanging in there.