PUNKUS EVERYWHERE
My friends think I’m crazy. Especially when I talk about my first serious love—Punkus! Punkus disappeared from my life about twenty-five years ago, but I still bug my friends about her—about the memories I have of her—about my hope of meeting her again someday soon. I tell them I still see Punkus…not in a banal, ghostly way—but in a real, tangible way. I often see her, not as I remembered her, but as how she must have looked as she aged—always beautiful, always desirable, yet always unattainable.
“Look at that woman sitting at the table in the corner,” I would say. “Doesn’t she remind you of Punkus?”
“Not in the least, she’s too fat.”
“But the eyebrows, Sam, aren’t those the eyebrows of Punkus?”
“You’re crazy.”
And so it would go through the years. Piece by familiar piece…characteristics I would recognize of Punkus in other women. Sometimes I would open a magazine, as I did a few moments ago, and there would be Punkus’s eyes staring at me from the page. Or walking along a street, I would catch a snatch of conversation coming from Punkus’s lips—only to discover the speaker was a stranger.
“Why do you torture yourself so,” my friends ask. “The longer you don’t hear from her, the less chances there are that she’s disappeared from your life forever!”
“But that’s the whole point!” I argue. “ As long as I can find some glimmer of recognizable feature of Punkus—however insignificant…however diaphanous—she will always be near.”
And who’s to know. As long as Punkus is everywhere—she’ll never be nowhere!
