My ears picked up on it the moment I walked through the entryway. As I walked up the staircase to the lecture hall, I could clearly make out sentences of the conversation being had behind me. It felt out of place to me, belonging to a different time and place.
Not Tri- as in triangle or tricycle, but Tri- as in Tree. Tree as in that family tree project I made in the third grade, still a novice to glue that came in sticks instead of bottles. The tree whose oldest branches spread far back to Spain, and in some cases, to Italy or France. The tree from which later branches grew in Argentina, a place where many branches still remain. Until, this newest, fledgling branch ended up on new American soil, taking up roots as it keeps trying to grow.
How do great friendships form, exactly? Sometime between laughing hysterically at a joke about lizard sex and walking home together as the sun goes up. Sometime after you make an embarrassing purchase together at 7-Eleven. Sometime after you share a near-death experience. Somewhere down the line when your texts to each other loose all grammatical correctness and you start addressing each other solely with either pet names or crude profanities.
“Come to Chabad for dinner with me and Hannie tonight!” It’s early in October when my roommate, Molly, makes the invitation. In my ignorance, I thought she was just pronouncing “Shabbat” differently and that we’d be going to the CJL for dinner.
To telescope is to slide concentric components within themselves, to shrink sequentially, to densen. It is also a means of interstellar discovery, of flooding, of applying pressure. In the succeeding entries, we telescope the weather by precipitating and saturating our memories. Each succeeding memory of a series is composed in exactly half the number of words of the previous. Condense with us.
