A Plan Develops

“Sentimental journeys were for the old and decrepit or the mentally weak. It was time to give this crap up.”

She smiled to herself as she realized that from out of the past the boy spoke to her. This wasn’t really her own thought, it was something that he had repeated over and over. Not unlike so many other teenage boys he wanted to be tough, to be viewed as a man. This was just one of those things he said and did to try and prove his manhood to the world.

Well the repetition had worked, at least she apparently had come to believe it. She wondered if he still did. He had tried so hard to be tough and she had tried to support him in this effort, even though she knew that he was not. He had a soft and tender side that would sneak out without warning. It was part of what attracted her to him, especially the fact that he wasn’t even aware of it.

She was always careful not to let him know what she really thought. It wasn’t that she thought badly of him, she loved that part. It made him more real, more human and less like some of the other idiots they went to school with. No she hid her true thoughts because men have fragile male egos and she would have been quite upset to have hurt him.

The light in the bathroom was less than perfect. It cast funny shadows on her face, making her look older than she really was. She spent extra time staring at herself trying to figure out if she really looked that old. Her body was still tight and lean, no children had come from her so nature had not done all that it could have to age her, at least not physically.

Overall she was pleased with what she saw. She wondered if the boy would still find her to be as attractive. Would he still be consumed with passion. Would he still desire her.

Back in school his desire had always been obvious. A man’s body had a way of betraying his thoughts. She had taken great pleasure in finding ways to make it hard for that not to happen. It was a bit of an ego trip, but a little positive attention never hurt and for certain it was a lot of fun to try and make him a little flustered. Ruffle his feathers and keep him off balance, why not.
In the Internet age it was easy enough to try and track someone down. Type their name into Google and a couple more search engines and you could often find a vast wealth of information. It might be kind of fun to try and locate him, play the voyeur and see what he was doing with himself these days.

Although the truth was that she was reluctant to find out what his present status was. She didn’t want to learn that he was married or find pictures of a family. Even though it had been years since their last communication it felt better to her to think of him as being single and available. There was some comfort in knowing that there might be a possibility of their being reunited.

Reunited. The word made her laugh. Once while waiting for a doctor she had read a trashy romance novel in which the hero had come for his love. The author had penned the classic line “their love was rekindled and reunited like East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

It was so bad that she had to laugh. But maybe it wasn’t that far fetched or silly to think of it in terms of the fall of communism. They had a bitter fight. It was long, protracted and towards the end very nasty. A lot of hurtful comments had been exchanged and even years later it wasn’t unrealistic to think that he could be angry. Or maybe she wanted him to still be angry because it would help to validate the feelings she had about their relationship.

The truth was that there had been something very good and special about their love. There had been a passion and a level of trust that she thought she would never experience again. The men who had followed the boy would have been shocked to have seen her then, or should she say they would have been surprised at how open and laid back she was.

That is not to suggest that she was cold and distant, but since then she had become far more controlling of who and what gained access to her heart. She had been in love at least a couple of times, but the soul piercing, time stood still, kind of her youth hadn’t come back. So maybe it made complete sense to wonder if the line from that book was applicable to her. Maybe, just maybe if she found him they could describe it as being similar to ““their love was rekindled and reunited like East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

But that was best left for a different day, the truth was that she really did need to figure out what to do with herself.

Will The Sun Shine Again

For many years she had avoided thinking about the end of her time with the boy. He had touched her in so many places, made her think about things, about life in a way that no one else had. She had given herself to him so completely, so deeply that in some ways it was hard to see where she ended and he began.

It was more than love and more than trust. There was a connection between them that she couldn’t verbalize or explain to anyone. She loved to watch him. He didn’t have to be doing anything in particular, it just made her feel good to watch him. There was something mesmerizing about him and it wasn’t any one thing.

When her friends would ask what she found so attractive she would stumble and stutter because she didn’t know how to empty the contents of her heart, how to share the things that you feel but cannot say.

So she would speak of his eyes and his wrists. She would talk about the way his lips felt on hers and how when she hugged him she felt never felt safer. She told them about how he looked at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world and that when he put his hand on her hip she felt electricity.

Sometimes she wanted to say more. Sometimes she wanted to tell them everything that she felt because it seemed selfish not to share something so amazing and wonderful with them. And in some way it was so hard not to try and bond with them over something so important to her.

In the end she never did share any of that with them. She came close one day but faltered when her girlfriend suggested that all girls felt this way about their first. It bothered her because she felt that it cheapened and degraded what she had so she just smiled and said nothing.

The end of their relationship had damaged her. It had broken her in ways that she didn’t really understand until many years later. The men that followed the boy were measured against his memory. At first it was conscious, but subconscious. That is, she couldn’t help but compare them and though she knew it was unfair she persisted in the unconscious search for the one who would make her forget the pain and the empty feeling.

It was an empty hollow feeling. There was a sense of things having been turned upside down. It reminded her of something she had seen on a field trip she took in second grade. They had gone to the zoo and were in the reptile house looking at turtles. The zookeeper turned his back and one of the boys took the turtle and flipped it upside down.

She remembered watching the turtle flop around, legs kicking in the air as it tried desperately to right itself. And it occurred to her that she felt a little bit like the turtle. In some ways her world had barely changed and in others it had been turned upside down.

After the breakup it was months before she let another boy kiss her. It was horribly awkward and uncomfortable. He grabbed her and shoved his tongue in her mouth while his hands roamed all over her body. She wanted to push him away and run but she was tired of crying herself to sleep and thought that if could endure this it might help her move on.

It did not.

And neither did the boy who came along that summer or the three that followed him.

The problem was that subconsciously she was still looking for him. When they kissed her she would close her eyes and try to lose herself in the moment but all of the little details made it clear that they were not him. They smelled differently, their breathing had a different rhythm and their touch was not quite right.

It was a long time before she allowed any of them to do more than kiss her and that was only because she forced herself to. It had been almost two years and she had decided that her university life had to have something more to it than studying and casual dating.

For a time it worked. For a time she felt like things were better and that she might be able to fall in love again. And in a way she did. The cloud that had followed her lifted a little and the sun began to shine again.

But in her heart she knew that it was never quite as sunny and that the skies were not quite so blue as they had been. The jagged hole didn’t hurt the same way it had used to and the familiarity of the pain was replaced with something else.

Now with the grace of time and distance she was finally able to see that the relationships that followed had all been doomed because she had been unwilling to let them work. It made her nervous and she wondered if she had spent so many years teaching herself how to be more detached that we would never be able to really give herself to someone again.

“The rumors flew but nobody knew how much she blamed herself

For years and years she tried to hide the whiskey on her breath
She finally drank her pain away a little at a time
But she never could get drunk enough to get him off her mind
Until the night

She put that bottle to her head and pulled the trigger
And finally drank away his memory
Life is short but this time it was bigger
Than the strength she had to get up off her knees
We found her with her face down in the pillow
Clinging to his picture for dear life
We laid her next to him beneath the willow
While the angels sang a whiskey lullaby”

(Sing lullaby)

Whiskey Lullaby- Brad Paisley