He brooded in the passenger seat. I drove. It was a dark, stormy night. I’m not trying to be a bad novelist; that’s just the way the night was: Rain pelted the ground, lightning occasionally flashed orange across the sky, and the wind crashed against the side of my vehicle and challenged me to maintain control.
Badi Sinclair mostly just stared intently into the dark storm; when I glanced his way he seemed simply to be staring into space, blankly, but his occasional words betrayed a dark internal storm that matched his surroundings.
“Dammit, I am not too intense!” he cried at one point, intensely, and I could not help laughing. He looked at me angrily, realized what he had said and how, and finally cracked a smile himself. “All right, but I’m only intense about the things that deserve intensity.”
“I’ll give you that,” I said. “I do think she has a point, but you do care about important things.”
“And nobody is ever going to love her like I did,” he snarled.
“That's a good sign – you used past tense.”
“What?”
“‘Nobody is ever going to love her like I did,’” I repeated. “Did. Not do. First sign you’re getting over it.”
He looked dumbfounded. I think he even whispered the phrase to himself again: “Love her like I did.”
That is how Badiah Sinclair processes thoughts and emotions: He holds them hard, he is passionate as anyone I’ve ever known, but when it’s time to move on, he moves on, consequences be damned. He might have “won back” the girlfriend who walked away from his intensity that night; in fact, Badi was right – when she became a semi-celebrity by virtue of having dated Badiah Sinclair before he was THE Badiah Sinclair, she gave an interview where she said no one since Badi had ever made her feel as loved.
But she told him she couldn’t handle his intensity, and so he grieved with his best friend for a few hours and moved on. It’s a quality that made him a masterful politician – he was able to accept and absorb defeat (or victory, for that matter) quickly and move on to the next urgent matter.
The one thing, to his everlasting credit, where he refused to accept defeat was in the matter of independence for Sirius 4. He intensely believed in Sirius 4’s right to choose its own destiny. That made him our greatest hero and, eventually, one of our greatest villains.
We talked about women that night, about dreams and about nothing at all; I remember almost nothing about our conversation. In fact mostly I remembered driving in the rain while both of us were wrapped up in thought and not talking at all. What I remember most is that we arrived at the outskirts of the capital city before I realized how many miles we had traveled. It was the first time we were together in the city that would play a central role in both our lives.
But we didn’t stop; not that night. We turned around and went home.
Entry 44. Closing time
No comments:
Post a Comment