What can I say about the girl in the green dress but that it was just the way she wore it and to me she was a cross between Lucille Ball and Snoopy. Or maybe it was Julia Roberts and a host of great Spanish poets. The first time I saw her wear the green dress was March 17, 2009. I remember that date not because it was St. Patty’s day but because it was my good friend’s birthday. Her name is Lauren Martin, my good friend, and we don’t speak that much anymore. She was actually not just a good friend, she was a great a friend, one of the best, and we used to hang out back in Spanish Harlem on my fire escape facing 2^nd avenue talking about zip codes or watching old Ali fights on my thirteen inch TV set. Her lifetime dream was to ask Noam Chomsky what he thought was beautiful.

Mr. Chomsky, she’d practice, what do you think is beautiful?

And I’d play the part of Chomsky. I was particularly good at talking with my hands and explaining the main arguments of essays I wrote in childhood.

But Lauren, having read all of his books, would pout and say, He wouldn’t say it like that!

You probably won’t believe me but one day she got her wish. She met Professor Chomsky at a lecture hall in Ohio State University, located in Columbus, Ohio, and so didn’t need me as a stand-in, but that’s another story (seven pages to be exact) and there are a host of other characters that need introduced before I can answer the question: What happened?

I miss Lauren. She had this killer laugh. It was the best I’d ever heard. It was so round, so kind, but also like a dying breath. And this one St. Patty’s day we got drunk on 51st street and bought a red ukulele off a leprechaun for six dollars and walked all sixty blocks back north to Spanish Harlem. We talked about our nieces and I played Dr. Dre riffs on the ukulele while free styling (I wasn’t really free styling. I was stealing from my own batch of rhymes I’d written in college, pretending to come upon the right rhyme at the right time) and then she told me that she really believed there was something in all human beings that would only ever find redemption in the external world through love but for this to happen each human being had to discover his or her own unique, uncompromising way of expressing that love and that, collectively, this will take a lot of work and a lot of time (owing a great deal to population growth in India and sub-Saharan Africa), a great deal of loss, and solitude, and possibly a nervous breakdown or two, but that redemption is possible, that it was in fact the destiny of all human beings.

Every St. Patty’s day I think of her and hope everything is going well on her end because beauty, she must now know, is hard to come by (when we look for it).

Anyway, it is time I talk about this particular March 17 and tell you about the girl who this is really about. Well, there she was, in the library. I met her there every day. There was a basketball court outside and sometimes, waiting for her, I’d watch the kids shoot hoop. There were always two kids there and I think they were brothers. They showed up before the rest of the bunch and stayed quite some time afterward – nights, leaving the library, I would see them shooting free throws in the half-dark. I think the technical term for it is gym rats, but this was no gym. In fact, it was hardly a basketball court at all. The rims were bent downward, the chains for nets were busted, and the free-throw lines were weeded up. The older one – tall, spindly – always instructed the younger one on his performance, it seemed, showing him why he’d gotten the ball stolen from him so many times or how to keep his shooting elbow tucked or how to explode off his first step to the hoop under pressure.

Sometimes he’d wrap his arm around his shoulder, and other times, he’d sit on the spare ball, tying his shoe laces, watching the younger one follow his instructions. Either way, he was always letting the little one in on a secret. Not to give up or to keep going at the whole thing a little harder.

The little brother was just a runt trying to perfect his jumper. I was you some fifteen, twenty years ago, I would think, and your brother was my own brother. Only instead of corn rows we had bowl cuts and instead of a basketball we had a couple of dead tennis balls and an aluminum baseball bat, but all the same, there was a time, one summer to be exact, when we were all we really had. Books. Basketball courts. And this girl, the girl in the green dress. That’s what those days were like for me. Watching those boys, waiting for her, I’d think of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There’s a nice passage in the book ruminating on the reasons a man picks up a trade. A doctor, if he’s any good, doesn’t practice medicine merely out of some selfless need to tend the sick, it says. A surgeon, rather. A surgeon has some intrinsic, yes even selfish, need to put his hands in the human body. It is carnal. Sub-verbal. Maybe his soul was carved out of that need or he inherited some unfinished business from an early ancestor. It can’t be known for certain except that the need to put his hands in the body, to know another man’s sickness through touch, is what calls a born surgeon to action. To life. What is that need, I always wondered? But it can’t be explained. I have it. You have it. There are needs so deep inside us that in order to live we have to fulfill them, to know and become those needs in full, to risk every other kind of failure (usually based on some kind of lowest common denominator social norm) for some kind of personal moral success, and to fulfill those needs we dig inside ourselves to fling them out of our bodies into the likeness and form of practice, faith, art, and even people that already exist in our world. And what if who we are inside does not show its face in the catalogue of ideas, faces, and Gods that exist in this world? Do we create wholly anew out of that need something that may never have existed, but needed to in order that we may live free? Under the clothes and beneath the breath and behind the tongue of another, inside the mind and the very smell of the one you love, you have to recognize the true needs of other human beings to coexist. And so, to exist at all. Or you risk dulling your impulses, bending the power of will, misinterpreting the beauty of new forms, ideas, and love itself. What is it in you that is reaching out, trying to exist, in the world of fact, infrastructure, policy, tradition, duty, and stone?

I saw a Michael Jordan interview once. He was talking about the basketball court. For those forty-eight minutes, he said, no one could touch him. He couldn’t feel himself think. He talked about the wood, the smell, the shine, the nets, and the little box that was his kingdom. I can’t shoot hoop and the sight of blood disgusts me. But libraries. Libraries are planetariums to me. The expanse of human thought, emotion, humor, pain, hunger, rage, sweat, and discovery. All of these things in their fullest sense can be found in a good library. You can smell the years in the books. You can undress an author’s mind with the backs of your eyes. Orwell was right. You can see a writer’s face in his words if he writes well enough.

But that day was different – the day I saw her in that green dress. Seeing her there in that dress for the first time made me believe that I was a man without a past. Sucker punch. It was that dress. I wanted to marry her right then, or at least, ask her out for jerked chicken.

I was writing an essay on Rwanda at the time. Sometimes reading about the genocide was a bit much. I mean sometimes it gave me a headache to read about that much blood and that many families headed for the ditch, but then sometimes the print was just too small. And that day I’d forgotten my glasses. Either way, in those days, I was either thinking about Rwanda or Julio Cortazar, who’d I’d read at night when it felt as if there was no one in this world who knew my name.

But she not only knew my name, she knew Julio Cortazar’s and she’d read him as much as I had – only she’d read him in Spanish, which means she had really read him – and she got the whole thing about the writer going inside the reader’s head to mess with the lights. Only she took it to heart a bit too much because after a while she’d have to put the book down and wouldn’t talk to me about literature for days. But there she was that day in that green dress and I wanted nothing more than to ask her out for some jerked chicken. But I was the jerk who was too chicken to do it because I thought she’d say no. Or maybe it was because I thought she’d say yes. But the thing is, that day, we sat across one another not really speaking and that was okay with me because I had to read about Rwanda and also I didn’t feel like I had any good jokes in me that day.

She came up to me and said, Hey, Schroeder.

My name is not Schroeder. She called me Schroeder because the way I bent over my computer typing away reminded her of the way the blonde headed cartoon boy created by Charles Schulz bent over his little piano, playing Beethoven.

And before I could say hello she said, Let’s go outside.

So we went outside and stood just by the door. She had a bag of gummy worms.

She stood there and said, I was bored and you make me laugh.

And after that I can’t really remember what we talked about.

All I remember is that out of nowhere she took her shoes off her feet. She had these little black shoes on. Almost like a little girl’s ballerina shoes though I know that’s not quite accurate. Anyway, they were the kind of shoes you see in a store front and automatically think of a little girl wearing them, walking pigeon toed. They reminded me of a school girl’s but it was great. Meaning, it was just the right touch. I pretended to snatch them out of her hand and she play-fought back. Man I almost died. Who knows. I was acting like I was going to smell them but what she didn’t know – or maybe she did – was that I really was going to do it. At that time, one of the girls sitting on the stone benches outside was playing Sympathy for the Devil on her phone. I laughed. Every time I hear that song I picture a row of Muppets singing the hoo hoo part and here was this beautiful woman in a green dress in little girl shoes playing along in this children’s game with a grown man who to her resembled a cartoon character. She laughed too. In any event, I played around with her shoes until the song ended and by then it was starting to get a little boring. The imaginary Muppets disappeared and the genuine fun was starting to wane and we were both going to have to start pretending to be amused if I didn’t wrap up the show pretty soon. So I gave her shoes back, buying some more time before speaking my heart. Everything disappeared but the charm of her green dress. I wanted to speak to her and I wanted to laugh. I wanted to tear the dress off with my teeth and I wanted to really know her, just the same. Just then I remembered her telling me about how they slip butter down your butt if you do the Tour de France. She told me this some days ago. If you do any biking events they slip this sport butter down your ass and she had to do that for her boyfriend in college when she was writing her senior thesis on one of the great Spanish novels of the 15^th or 16^th centuries. Maybe it was The Life of Lazirillo De Tormes. We laughed and laughed about that and other things and I was able to speak my heart without really saying much. Which she understood.

All I can really say now is that she was that green dress that day, she really was, and walking back home she was all I thought about. I was used to being alone those days. No sorrows, no gripes. I’d gotten used to eating my dinner over the sink, forgetting to get a haircut, losing my keys, reading for what seemed like days, weeks on end. I was struggling for an inner peace. I think it came every now and then, but like a jazz musician I was hungry for that sustained intensity. Peace was an intensity I thought I couldn’t live without. I wasn’t aware that I knew nothing about what I was after and that genuine peace comes, in some way, from opening yourself up to embrace other views and forms of love. But she walked in, in that green dress, sort of barefoot and blinded by laughter and play, and I didn’t see the rest of her, or who she really was. I couldn’t get past a certain vision of beauty that I’m now not even quite sure existed as I recall it. The world, this life, is complex but not incomprehensible, though there is rarely any clarity in the things we see, the people we seem to think we love and know the best. A few months ago, talking to a friend, he said that the worst thing about love is the expectations. That they are unavoidable. I didn’t know if I agreed or not but he has a way of expressing his ideas. So I listened.

When you decide to love someone, or when you know you’re probably going to, he said, it’s the one moment of purity you really have with them. That’s the one moment devoid of expectation. You know that you love this person. But you also know you expect nothing from them or of the world that gave them to you. And every day after that is a battle to maintain that realization. But you can’t. It goes, the purity, the freedom, the detachment, all of it disappears, the bottom falls out, and you should only think about what you saw, what you really understood, every so often. When everything was still and calm and you thought: No bad deeds will be done. The notion is false, but the feeling is true.

Expectations. They follow, they hover, they nest, and eventually, you destroy each other with them. That’s for sure. But there’s always that moment when you decided to love her. Freely. Innocently. It’s nothing, really, by itself. But thrown back in the face of a world built to destroy good intentions, it helps. And eventually you learn that the feeling, though changed, harder perhaps, less pliant and even less innocent, is eternal and real. You must make do. You are alone in this mad brutal world, Krishnamurti says. Okay. But that moment, when you’re switched on? Grab it, but don’t hide behind who you think you are. The moment may guide you through the mine fields that spring up as you walk with and\or without that person, somewhere dark, hideous and lonely but you cannot move from here to there or from there to the next place completely and confidently alone. Though every man, every woman, every one, it seems, requires some degree of solitude to understand what they think about this world, and so, how they must move about it. How many lives have I lived in the days I’ve known her, ignited. Well I have moved this far. And I am still walking. Towards her, away from her. I have hurt her and she has torn me apart. Well I’ve pulled my head out of the sink, and there is a seed of peace in the shape of some odd thing that resembles her name and memory in the garrets of my heart. I’m talking to you. I am talking to her. From the flicker she gave me. Which is simply the ripples of a green dress.