photo: Elizabeth Tsung, Unsplash
If we are lucky, we encounter a great love at some point in life. I met mine in high school.
On and off over the past eighteen years I have been all-too aware of this little-known fact, sometimes consumingly so.
Last year at Christmas I aimlessly wandered the Barnes & Noble bookstore in my hometown. I paused at a shelf, a wave of emotion traveling through my body at the sight of a particular cover.
“Where are you?” I whispered aloud. I felt someone looking and turned to see my Dad watching me carefully.
I turned the other way.
Because, many edges of home still feel like you. Not in a physical, tactile sense like the way you’d remember someone’s embrace or the smell of their jacket.
You haunted me like a ghost. Not quite a ghost of a person or entity, but of a relationship frozen in time. Not even a relationship, but the sprouting seedling of one that never came fully to fruition.
Of two ships passing in the night.
For a long time the ghost was omniscient and large and I felt foolish about this.
I blamed it on harboring an usually high level of sensitivity, or nostalgia for something prosaic that remained from what was good of our teenage years.
I sometimes wonder if our relationship set the tone that would later peg me as the “cool girl” throughout my 20’s. Then again, I was always all about being weird and having fun. You were weird, too. That’s why we got along. And that’s how it almost worked.
And every year at Christmas, the ghost was there – when I went to the sports bar you and your friends used to haunt, or while driving through your old neighborhood to and from the Cleveland Hopkins Airport.
It used to be worse. After college I found myself re-visiting the places we used to go, not realizing until later that I was looking for you.
I was waiting for you, just as I’d done during those late years in high school, then college, even during and post-grad school.
But it was you who passed me by.
It was eight or nine years ago when I went to the movies and saw you and your wife as I entered the theater. Although it was just out of the corner of my eye, I knew it was you because of the way you froze too, handful of popcorn halfway to your mouth.
The next year you came to L.A. for work and sent me a message about getting together. I didn’t want to see you because I was afraid. I had to set boundaries because you had everything and at the time I was flailing with nothing at all.
Besides, you had too much on me.
You were the only one who knew how lonely I was when I lived in Paris the summer of 2000.
And that when I returned to the states I immediately moved to Boston to be near you.
And when we were both students at that big school we shared the same major and even worked at the same radio station. We took classes together and at night danced to oddball bands that played in the corners of dark bars.
Once during a lecture, something clicked in my brain and like an involuntary reflex I whipped around to look back at you. You were grinning right back at me, the biggest smile I had ever seen – I don’t even remember why.
You were the one who convinced me to move to Los Angeles, a decision that would change my life forever.
I never told you this, but when you wanted to join me in LA and we chatted on the phone that time, for four hours or whatever it was, I could barely hear you because the reception was so bad. But I stayed on the line because it was nice to hear your voice.
But you didn’t move to LA, and we didn’t see each other until I came home at the end of that year.
You picked me up from my parents house in your new car and we drove downtown for drinks and dinner. When we were stopped at a red light you showed me a picture of your girlfriend that had been tucked carefully within the folds of your wallet.
It was a photo from when she was a cheerleader in high school, and I laughed and you got mad at me for laughing. And then I got defensive and said something about how glad I was to be a free bird.
The next year you got married.
I always figured we’d marry each other when we both turned 40 if we hadn’t found anyone else, but you had always said 30.
I guess I had some growing up to do. And besides, there was stuff for me to accomplish, goals to achieve and adventures to go on – I wasn’t ready to settle down quite yet.
And the further I ventured out into the world, the less comfortable I became each time I went home. This feeling would grow until I morphed into a completely unidentifiable version of myself.
Then I went to New York. But that’s another story.
This Christmas Day I took a long walk around my parent’s neighborhood. It was six pm and dark outside. I bundled up and maneuvered my way through the slicked patches of black ice on the road. I saw families sitting down for Christmas dinner – wearing bright red sweaters, drinks in hand, faces polished and relaxed.
Holiday place-settings with sparkly hints of gold and silver.
I stood in front of one house and watched the holiday lights revolve, rotate, and spin a pattern over my body as I stood by myself on the sidewalk peering in.
I was on the outside of all of that now.
And for the first time in my life, it felt okay.
Mostly because I was once again recognizable.
My chapter on you has closed, joined all the other lives; as a student, club kid, artist, photographer, model, DJ, show host, graphic designer, athlete, socialite, whatever else I’ve been or done or that isn’t mine anymore.
My heart used to roam and wander with each trip home and no one else knew where it went.
And since you started a family a chunk of me got lost in there somewhere, either dissolved or left behind as you moved along without me.
These pieces have since returned. They never left, really – they had just gotten lost in the fray as I moved along in my journey, looking for myself in this big old messy life.
Besides, who are we really looking for other than ourselves?
But you are out there somewhere, happy I hope. In this most precious life, that’s what I wish for you the most.
And the good news is, I am here – happy, healthy, and finally, complete.