A few years ago, a friend came over to my house to catch up and hang out.
We were sitting around my dining room table chatting when she said, “Can I use the bathroom?”
I said, “Oh sure but I think it might be a bit messy. Just give me one quick second and let me go check if it’s all right.” I went to take a look.
Thank God that day, my washroom was clean and I didn’t have to worry. I came right back out.
When I came back out, my friend was gone.
I looked and looked and looked for my friend until finally she came back. She said, “I just went and peed in the backyard.”
We fast forward this story to a few months later when I am at a restaurant with two men and the same friend and the friend is saying to the two men, “You know. I always call Carol and try to do things with her but Carol doesn’t care about me. She never does anything with me.”
I went home and I thought about it.
What could it be?
What went wrong?
When did the calling stop?
“You know, I think it was that night you peed in my backyard.”
I have never recovered.
I cannot recover.
I will never recover.
I guess up until that point, I didn’t have any experience with someone casually peeing in my backyard. If she had been drunk and threw up in my backyard I would have said, “I guess she was drunk. Poor thing.”
But we were just casually sitting there at the dining table, probably sipping tea, followed by her casually peeing in my backyard.
When I later told this story to someone, they said,
“Oh, she was about 15 years older than you. Maybe she had a weak bladder and she couldn’t hold it.”
To which I replied,
“But the bathroom was clean. I came right back.”
“Maybe she thought you were going to be long and couldn’t take that risk.”
Then, there is a part of me that’s thinking, “Perhaps she came from one of those countries where that’s OK.”
Like me!
Back in Jamaica, you would from time to time, see a Jamaican man leaned up against a wall in an alley or something peeing.
However, I have to say that in all my years of living in Jamaica I never saw anyone just casually go pee in my yard.
But what is the point of all this talk about pee?
Well, sometimes, a friendship is broken. Sometimes, one friend doesn’t even know why the other disappeared.
Sometimes that confused friend is me and sometimes I’m the one doing the disappearing.
This dear woman to this day, doesn’t realize how much she freaked me out.
Now it seems kind of silly.
There are people walking around today who claim they have had near death experiences where they went to heaven and came back. They tend to say the same thing,
“In heaven, there are no misunderstandings. You know exactly what the other person meant by every thought and every action.”
On those confusing nights, when a friend goes missing in your backyard or in your life, only a little piece of heaven can save us.
This article was originally published on March 31st, 2010.
Obsolete links from the original article have been removed where applicable.
