Jan. 18, 2011
I touched him three times that morning. The first was accidental, my hand brushing his knuckles as I reached for my coffee. The second I think I just wanted to feel the warmth of his skin, know that he was really sitting there and this was really happening. The third was to make sure he wouldn’t forget me.
Not that I was really worried that he would forget me. I was pretty confident he wouldn’t. After all, he’d known me most of his life. That wasn’t the reason I made an impression that particular morning. It was more than that. It was like suddenly realizing what we'd spent the past ten years missing out on.
Of course neither one of us realized it with that much clarity that morning. All we knew is that we were two old high school friends meeting up for coffee and to catch up. Two damaged, divorced single parents just looking for old pals to maybe connect with. It wasn’t an intentional date. It wasn’t supposed to be destiny.
Three hours went by in a blink. I studied his eyes, his hands, his smile, surreptitiously, as we sipped coffee slowly. He’d changed a lot since high school, since the last time I’d seen him. Gone was the slim, clean-shaven boy with the light in his dreamy, smiling eyes. In his place was a man, one with broad shoulders and a five o’clock shadow and something else. The past ten years played across his face as he talked, turning his cup absently. I saw heartbreak and experience. His eyes now showed a man who had seen too much but managed to keep a handle on himself despite something inside screaming against injustice and hurt.
I wondered as I played with my own coffee cup, shredding the liner and a napkin in my distraction, what he was thinking looking at the changes in me. An older, somewhat thicker version of the girl he must have imagined. A woman now, with dark hair replacing the natural blonde, and a smile tinged with regrets. Blue eyes darkened by the loss of innocence and the passage of time.
As two new old friends we talked for hours and left wondering what had just happened. Later we compared notes from that morning and realized that despite ourselves we spent the next few days thinking about the other, about what they were doing and thinking and feeling. Later he told me that he realized immediately that his life would never be the same.
I was slower in figuring things out. Newly single, I was enjoying the dating life. I wasn’t looking to get involved and it was still so strange to me, to be thinking in any real terms of romance with my old high school friend. A friend I never quite connected with enough in the past, that much was certain. I couldn’t get enough of him in some way-- I wanted to talk to him on the phone, to text and email and hear what he had to say about everything and tell him all my deepest secrets. On other levels I was completely cold to him, locked in frozen confusion as to what it all meant.
I’m sure those first few weeks and months were frustrating to him, especially being so much further along in the progression of feelings than I. Me with my rules, my unbreakable rules, rules meant to protect me from repeating past mistakes. Rules like no military guys, no cops, no guys with young children, no recently divorced men-- a funny one because I myself was recently divorced. He fell into every category in some way. And yet, despite all my infallible methods of protection, he managed to become necessary to me. Inescapable.
Once he put an end to it all. He got some bad news, unrelated to whatever was happening between us but with my resistance to anything beyond friendship, he had had enough. After all, he deserved to protect himself from heartbreak too, and he had enough other problems without adding unrequited love to the list. He was agitated, upset, and decided that with all the other issues, pursuing someone not interested in him wasn’t on his to do list. He called for radio silence.
This silence lasted nearly ten minutes. Ten minutes of a cease fire of communication that had been constant since that morning coffee. We hadn’t stopped talking or texting since we’d reconnected, and that silence nearly killed me. I felt like I had lost a limb. I think then I knew, on some level, if not in my head, that I would never exist without him. Not just live-- one can live without something they love, like a diabetic giving up chocolate or an alcoholic who’s taken his last drink. But to me he wasn’t an addiction, he was a need. It was like asking me to live without oxygen, without water, without food or light or heat.
And heat, as it turned out, was my final undoing. After all the weeks of my resistance I returned from a week-long trip to find myself wanting to spend time with him in person. In the flesh, in real life, with no electronic barriers of phones and emails and safe miles between us. If he was my oxygen, I wanted to know it.
The first time he kissed me I felt the heat. It spread over my entire body as soon as our lips met, warming me to my core. I felt numb and alive all at the same time, shocked into disarming cardiac arrhythmia. He was gentle, undemanding, but there was something so sensual and compelling about his kiss. I wanted more-- I couldn’t stop myself from falling into his arms.
The first kiss was like the first time seeing the ocean. The marvel of size and vastness and sheer depth-- it changed everything for me forever. From that moment on, even though it wasn’t until a few days later that I told him, I was his. Mind, body, and soul, I knew he was the last man I would ever kiss, the only man I have ever loved. It sounds like comical hyperbole to say that, to throw words around that are used so commonly in the language of romance. Words like soul mate, forever, til death.
I don’t think I ever really believed in soul mates, not really. To me it was a concept created by Hallmark to suck in gullible saps. Nothing a jaded divorcee would be capable of believing in, at any rate. I knew without a doubt that in this life and any before or after, he and I were sealed and connected in a way that perhaps God had intended, and in a bond that no human could break.
Maybe I’m an extremist or a romantic. Maybe the world has sucked the meaning out of love, until it’s cold and dark and common. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that forever love, the kind I have with my soul mate, doesn’t happen for everyone. It’s a rare and precious thing, and one I will always treasure and never take for granted. Yep, I used the word never. And forever.
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