love//the first time around

Love, the first time around, is messy and fast and all together muddled and perplexing.

Love was the first time you put your hand on my knee and and I forgot entirely how carsick I was.  It was the last time you really looked at me like somehow I was magic as we sat together in the front of your Tacoma.  I had spent so much of our conversation looking out the window, only to turn and find you staring at me smiling.  That smile with those ever deepening lines around your eyes, it always got me.

Now, I can't seem to remember the very last time we spoke.  I don't think I etched that moment into memory, probably because I was too hurt and bitter after everything happened. What I think I remember is one of the last times we spoke, when you broke our coffee date because you forgot you had class that night.  I remember wondering how it is you could have forgot such a thing as having class?  However, it would be the same excuse I would use only weeks later to break a date myself.

I remember clinging to your grey sweatshirt when we sat together in the nosebleed bleachers of the baseball park about four months after we first met.  Everyone else we knew was spread out in the rows in front of us chattering away.  You had made your way back up to sit with me and my friends dispersed.  There we were together, in the beginning of it all, among a crowd, but feeling like we were the only two people in the world.  I pretended to be into the game, saying something about the runner on 2nd, and you said you didn't care about the game, you just wanted to talk to me.  You said, with your face turned toward me, while my eyes were fixed on the field, that you wanted to know everything about me.  My heart raced as I felt the intensity of your gaze and the weight of those words.  I smiled and pulled your arm into mine because it felt like such a very safe and natural thing to do.

The moment I got home that night, I penned those words in my journal.  They felt too important to not record. No one had ever said anything like that in my whole 21 years of life.  I didn't ever want to forget them, no matter how things would unfold from there.

Two years later, I threw that journal away, when the idea of us was no longer in question.

I heard about you recently. You found a wife that you met online.  You have a son and a daughter.  You work hard to provide for them.  You do the things you love while building that little family of yours.  When I heard the whole story, I smiled.  I was really, truly glad for you. 

A year after it ended, you told me love was a choice.  You had a beer in your hand and you were acting so nonchalant.  So many people surrounded us and the music was loud.  I felt dizzy.  I wanted you to come outside with me, but I couldn't muster the courage to ask.  I imagine you would have.  But you continued to wax poetic saying that we get to choose who we love, and I remember thinking, how do I un-choose you? You went on to lament the many girls who had walked away recently.  I wanted to ask why you didn't care that I was happy to stay, but instead I slipped out of the party and drove to the lake and parked in the dark of a late Wednesday night and cried.  I must have cried for over an hour.  I put way more hurt on your words than you probably ever intended.

The first time you asked me out was to a bbq at a friend's apartment.  We barely spoke the whole night, but I remember you watching me from the balcony as I sat with the other girlfriends in the living room.  And I thought, this must be heaven to hold a man's eye like this.  Every time I would glance up and catch your eye, you would wink or smile.  It was nice to be seen and known by you.  It was assuring in a way I had never known before.  I loved when you told the other girls you were going to "steal me away".  I took your hand knowing I would follow you wherever you lead.

Last night I tried to find the one picture I have of us together.  I started to cry when I thought I might have thrown it away by now.  But I hadn't.  It was buried in the bottom of a box of pictures from college.  We are in our graduation gowns.  You are wearing your cap and I am wearing my hair full and swept to the side.  My smile seems a bit sad but you seem genuinely happy.  Your arm is around my shoulder and your hand lays across my chest.  My hands are holding your arm.  We appear at ease with each other.  My head is resting against your neck.  I suddenly am startled by the memory that it was moments after this photo was snapped that you told me you couldn't come to my graduation party.  You didn't give a reason and I didn't ask.  I just accepted the broken promise all the while thinking that was when I was supposed to introduce you formally to my parents with the thought that you may just be the man I might someday marry.  

I stared at your face a long while last night searching to find the man that I thought I loved.  I recognize now that love stories digress in their course and sometimes they don't end with getting the guy.

I suppose it was the picture she posted on MySpace that shifted everything for me.  You and her and them.  Sharing a meal.  Playing games. You had told me the day before I saw that, that pursuing me was the best choice you had made that year.  And yet, those words spoken by you did not fall on my ears the same way.  There was always another her.  The whole way through.  I was just too naive to see it.

My therapist said it probably wasn't love.  But let's call a spade a spade and say it was.  It was for me because it was life-altering.  My therapist mostly heard about the ways in which what we had was so debilitating and crippling for me, so I can't really blame his conclusions.  But for you, I always wonder, maybe it was love, and you were just able to love many at the same time.

I don't actually know what to call that.  Maybe such an idea strips any authenticity from the love, but I can't discount the good memories.

I am pleased to hear that you have become the man that I think I always knew you could be.  I am pretty sure if I had to do it all over again, I might not even change one thing, if it means we both could end up in this same place and take the same paths that we did to get here.  I'd say it was worth it.