In May of 2006 I moved back to Bristol for the summer, to live with my father and closer to my family and friends while I saved up enough money to leave to country. I, of course, was especially excited about the prospects of getting to hang out with my besty more or less any time I wanted, who was staying with her parents that summer as well.
The first time we had a tree house party in the tree house that my Pops, my bro and I built in our backyard, Verny was one of three special guests in attendance. I'll elaborate on the good times we had in the tree house in a forthcoming post, but for now I'd like to talk about something in particular I remember from this occasion.
Dad had rigged up a big chord that ran all the way into the tree house, so we had enough electricity to have a lamp, a small boombox, and even hook up my laptop to look at pictures or play music. This night I had my laptop out, and below it the wallpaper I had on during the time.
You could say that my desktop background was….well, unusual to say the least. Definitely funny. Perhaps even slightly creepy. I would light-heartedly agree. But I'd also say that is has a lot in common with typical backgrounds. People like to decorate their backgrounds with things they admire or enjoy, like vehicles, bands, works of art. The reason I made this my background was because I liked this picture of Veronica--she looked genuinely happy and at ease in it--but it was so small that it would get too pixelly if I'd made it full screen, so I just put it in tiles.
I had had this background on for at least a couple of weeks before the evening of the first tree house party. It always cheered me up to see her smiling face, and it would make me laugh because there was a bunch of smiling Vernys! I admit, however, that I considered changing the background before she came over, but must have put it off or forgotten about it. I mean think about it: Imagine if you came over to a friend's place and there desktop background is nothing but a repeat picture of your face…! A little ridiculous, right!??
Well there is was, shamelessly active when Verny got onto my laptop, and if you know how Vern feels about pictures of herself you can only imagine the trauma that ensued. "Rene! You know I hate that picture of me! You put this up just to tease me about it, didn't you?" Jesse was there and he thought it was hilarious. I thought it was funny too, but she got over it and we all joked about it.
It is only one of many backgrounds I've had up of Verny since. It wasn't uncommon for me to gloat about my best friend whenever the opportunity arose, and no matter how far apart we were I could always see her on my desktop. Every picture I'd put up, mostly of us together, we were either making crazy faces or caught in a huge laughing frenzy. The crazy faces come naturally in most situations, but in no other pictures have I ever seen either myself or Verny smiling so loud at the ones we were in together.
(January 2009)
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