1.
"Can you feel that?" I whispered, as I buried my head further beneath the cream and faded green blankets. I clutched the cordless phone tightly to the smooth skin of my child-like face. I cupped my palm around the mouthpiece and spoke softly, so not to wake my father in the next room. Around that time we spent many nights like this, one-thousand miles away tucked into bed at 2:00 A.M., our teenage minds constructing dreamworlds where our mouths would meet.
"I can see your eyes", he said, "They're right in front of me". His own stared at the ceiling in a dreamlike trance, arms and legs stretched across the white sheets of his extra-long twin size dorm room bed, phone balanced in the space between his head and shoulder. He pushed the tousled dark brown strands out of his face, as if to get a better look.
"I feel like you're right here with me. I feel like I can hold you, touch you. Please come here".
They had met six months earlier, their eyes had locked across a crowded parking lot at a Phish show in the throws of the truly rebellious stages of their youth. She hadn't been home in months. Many teenagers find themselves struggling for a sense of self and identity, seeking to find meaning and purpose while locked in the blocked off cement world of a middle class high school. She simply couldn’t take it. So, for a while, she left. Maybe she was simply succumbing to a naive vulnerability created by youth and the struggles of that stage in her life, but she hadn't forgotten the way the deep chestnut of his glance told her things that would take years to understand. She knew that he felt the same. They held tightly to that moment as the darkness enveloped their bodies leaving the mind's eye to do its work. All they knew was the feeling they had in their chests.
"I want to feel your breath", I said. "I want to inhale you so it slips past my lips, rushes through my throat, and down my arms to rest in pinpoints on my fingertips. If you were inside me, really inside, our souls fully intertwined, I would feel your thoughts, your speech, your heat. We would never be alone again. We would never have to be alone".
He went to visit her in New Hampshire. They held each other close, and promised they would be together forever. But forever is a long time when your seventeen.
2.
A year went by. She dropped out of high school and moved out. Eighteen came and went in an chaotic blur. Drugs, a boyfriend, an abortion, a couple jobs. In the midst of the mess, she found her way into college. She still spoke with him daily. Walking across her quintessential north east campus one day, staring at the trees, daydreaming as usual, she had a moment of realization and took a sharp right into the study abroad office. She looked hopefully at a woman with thin, pink lips and a face caked in a thick foundation, “I want to go to California”. That summer, she moved from Keene back to her parents house before embarking on her journey across the country, and on a whim, he came to visit her.
I looked up into his tanned face, my eyes beaming in wonder, unbelieving that he was truly there again. I gazed at our hands clasped together over the center console, I had never felt something so right. “You’re beautiful. This is beautiful”, I said. My jean skirt barely covered my thighs, and I let his hand drop softly to my leg and brush against my skin. I arched my back and head up towards the roof, the fading sunlight catching the sun-kissed blonde strands of my hair as it tumbled down my shoulders. I was nineteen and he was twenty. We spent the summer months in ecstasy. We read the Toa Te Ching, meditated on the beach in North Carolina, and got Mayan long count tattoos as symbols of what we meant to each other. We felt, when we were together, that our hearts and souls were one, that we knew the meaning of love. We felt as if the whole world was ours, was there to allow this.
He went with her to california. One night in San Rafael, she held him down by his shoulders, her naked pussy pressed against his chest, "I love you, ask me. We are soul mates. Ask me". He looked up into her wild gray blue eyes, eyes that he was inexplicably drawn to, "Will you marry me?"
3.
Their dream life in California didn’t pan out as expected. It was too expensive, too difficult, and they were too young. She started studying poetry at her new school, and he went back east. As most gray-eyed, blonde haired young girls do, she found a new boy; she said she was drawn to the insatiable blue. But, once he fell asleep, eighteen and satisfied, she crept out of the room with his cell phone and snuck down to think on the cold, cement stairs. She dialed his number, he answered, and sounded drunk.
"I thought about you. All I could think about was you. I miss you."
"I miss you too”, he said.
I listened to his breath and watched the rain fall on the campus I now called home, thousands of miles from my family and friends. My only comfort was the smell of worms and the phone resting against my cheek. I pictured his face, and his chestnut brown eyes. I thought of his arms wrapped around me and the intensity of his touch. I listened to him tell me that he loved me, that he needed me, and I thought of how I loved him too. I rested my head against the cool chipped paint of the banister as if to ease my thoughts from the outside in, I closed my eyes- then remembered the boy I had left inside.
"I have to go, I'll call you soon".
She didn’t call, and she dropped out of school two months later.
4.
The rain eventually stopped. She awoke daily to the smell of salt and sea and sweat. The beach had beckoned to her, but the city claimed her. She learned how to drink, how to walk
alone at night, to cook, to sign a lease, hold a job, to write. Still, she sought his words and voice. She figured out how to get through college. She lived with boys, and lived alone, and in time, she called this new place home. But each morning, she would sneak on her AIM, and only ever speak to him. She was taught about literature, and diversity, about being a woman and the meaning of “free”. She learned how to love in a certain place and time, about complacency, just living, the mundane and the sublime. Still, she would find free moments, to call, to text, to listen to him, and to prattle about the lives they lived. Three years went by.
5.
We met at a bar in brooklyn. It was January. I took one look at his face, his eyes, something was different. Was it me? I crowded, somewhat uncomfortably, with some new friends at the counter, taking shots and laughing. I was attempting to gracefully deflect pick-up lines, while still accepting the free drinks. I remember my skirt was pulled up above my navel, eyes lined thick. My ripped black tights and cardigan showed him who I was now, or at least who I thought I was.
“Can I just talk to you”, he whispered, trying to grab my hand.
“I don’t know what you want to talk about Jonathan. Come on, get a drink”.
That night was a lost cause. Once we were drunk enough, he hailed a cab, and we both got in. We couldn’t even look at each other.
They sat gazing out the window, musing on the thick white snowflakes and wondering if any of them ever did look the same. The cabbie stopped outside a brick warehouse, and he watched her wrap her coat more tightly around her self and step into the freezing air.
I glanced back, "Thanks", then walked away.
6.
Months went by. They continued talking, and eventually moved passed the incident in Brooklyn. As they always do, another summer finally came. The year she was to graduate, by chance, they were in the same place at the same time. Their old stomping grounds, a Phish show.
I tried to push him away, but he was persistent. We held hands and led each other through the crowd of dreadlocks and smoke, greeting old friends and acquaintances along our way to the top of the venue. It felt like the old times.
She looked up at the bright Colorado stars as they leaned against a concrete wall, “Esther” played in the background. He held her close, his hand resting on the back of her head. He buried his mouth into her long blonde hair, kissed the tops of her ears, his breath grazed her neck, and he whispered: "Don't you remember"?
I grasped the tops of his shoulders, ran my palms down the sides of his arms, thumbs sliding past the inside of his elbows and wrists. I strung my fingers through his, and dug my nails into the tops of his hands and cast my gray blue eyes up to the deep brown of his.
She stood, frozen, flooded with memories of the past six years. She was overcome with momentary glimpses of whispered words and broken promises. She looked at him now, and mused on how far they had come from their sleepless teenage nights. She was twenty-two, and he was twenty-three, and she realized in a single moment, that she felt exactly the same as she had then, as she always had.
I leaned in until my lips touched the side of his face, and took a deep breath, feeling an old feeling rise up through my chest, "I remember".
