Some Wintry Reminiscence

It was almost ten years since we’d spoken. You left so quickly that we’d made promises about circumstances under which you’d come back to me that, perhaps, we both knew neither of us could keep, though I didn’t allow myself those thoughts. Not then, anyway. I didn’t realize how much of an impression you’d made on me. In your curlicued handwriting, you’d written down you address for me to write to you. I kept that scrap of paper in my wallet for just over two years. In that time I wrote three letters and was too much of a coward to send any of them.

I thought about you a lot, but my memory of you began to fade after I met someone else, but never completely. As Mr. Bernstein explained, you were my girl with the white parasol. Who knew if you’d ever remember me, but I would bet there hasn’t been a month that has gone by in all that time when I haven’t thought of you.

My mind would often drift into all of the wonderful possibilities we could have had together.

When my self-conscious had given your image a rest for any extended period of time, my sub-conscious would remind me of you. You appeared in my dreams, sometimes to tell me something I could never quite hear, other times to… Well… You know how dreams are.

Every so often I would get drunk and decide that I just had to speak to you again, to hear your voice, to have you pay attention to me just one last time.

This behavior grew from two things.

One: I’d read too many stories about my favorite author getting drunk and looking up old friends, lovers and acquaintances, and:

Two: I came to the realization, odd as it may sound, that you were the first girl I was head over heels in love with.

I didn’t know how much our brief time together shaped my attitudes and desires toward women. It wasn’t until a few years after you’d left that I realized you were the reason I was so attracted to girls with dark, red hair. Girls with dark, almond shaped eyes as beautiful as yours sent jolts of delight running up my spine.

But none of them were you.

And so every few months I’d try to look you up, though I never seemed able to come up with anything. I’d assumed that you’d either changed your last name or were totally computer illiterate. I’d resigned myself to the thought that I’d never hear from you again.

That simple thought broke my heart over and over again, but I never stopped trying to find a way to contact you.

Things changed a few weeks ago when I finally managed to track down your sister, whom I was friendly with. She had changed her last name but posted both on a couple of places that Google was able to find. When I found her profile on a social networking site, my heart skipped a beat. Suddenly, speaking to you one more time was within my grasp in a way that hadn’t for 9 or more years. But at that moment I hesitated to contact your sister. After all, what was I to you after all these years? We were children when we knew each other. We’d both moved on, we were happy with our lives the way they were, I was sure of it.

But there was this nagging feeling in the bottom of my heart that somehow we’d left something unsaid, some emotion unexplored and, with the hope that I wouldn’t come across as some obsessed little boy (which I surely was when we’d known each other) I sent your sister a message.

I told her that I hoped she remembered me, though I knew full well that she would have at least some recollection. I explained that I had been reminiscing about the times we’d all had together in the past and had often wondered what had happened after you and I had parted ways.

When she got back to me the next day, I was elated. Of course she remembered me, she wrote, “and I’m sure my sister would love to hear from you.”

I wrote her back, asking how to get a hold of you and two whole agonizing weeks passed before she got back to me. She gave me your number and I was both excited and disappointed. It was wonderful, exhilarating even, when she said that you not only remembered me, but had been thinking about me recently, but it was disappointing that I didn’t get her message until well into the night, much later than would have been acceptable to call anyone, let alone someone you hadn’t spoken to in almost a decade.

And so I waited with patient excitement until I could call you today. When you answered the phone, for a few minutes it felt as though no time had elapsed. Though, as we got talking, it was obvious that a raging river of time had gotten between us. We both had kids, we were both involved with someone to some degree to another. People we knew mutually had drifted away, further than even we had.

Soon enough the conversation turned to what happened between us and suddenly it all made a sort of forlorn sense. As we spoke, it was striking how different we’d become but how the same we still were after all these years. The one thing, more than anything, that left me absolutely dumbstruck was how little I realized how much alike you and the girl I married are. From the desire to be in an open relationship to be with other girls and the bartending goals, to the lack of most romantic urges and to the ease of providing quick answers to everything, it was almost as though I’d married you, save a few key characteristics.

But in all the years of being with my wife, I never understood your affect on my choice of partner was (perhaps sub-consciously), despite it being a profound one.

We talked for over an hour and would have carried on if your boyfriend hadn’t (allegedly) needed to use the phone.

Our conversation ended with the promise of more to come. This was a promise that sounds as though it would be kept, particularly since I could actually feel in your voice that you were as into me as I was into you back then. There was a careful joy in your voice as we talked, and for someone who can be as anti-social as I know you can be, it was hard for you to mask your excitement.

I was too much of a coward (once again) to tell you the one thing I’ve waited all these years to tell you. I wanted to open up, like an old book (perhaps a Hemingway novel, or some Greene) and tell you that one of the single largest regrets of my life came on that cool autumn night that we walked in your neighborhood, hand in hand, for hours.

I made the mistake of (as clueless teenagers often do, I’m sure) of stopping you and asking polite permission to kiss you.

You said no.

Not simply kissing you, passionately, and trying harder to hold on to you is that which I wish I had the courage to have done.

And today I wish I would have had the courage to tell you that. I looked for it, but it came up empty.

Perhaps, though, I can try next time now that I’m reasonably certain there will be a next time.

And that thought alone fills me with hope.