Walking with ghosts

"Here's my hand."
"And mine, with my heart in't."
*****
There's nothing more beautiful or more deadly than lovesick teens.  Before the first heartbreak, with all the longing in the world-love has the possibility to be everything and there is no reason to hold back, remain circumspect.  Meredith remembered that feeling as her heels clicked off the empty walls of her old school.  Ten years, had it really been ten years?  The ghosts of her youth were walking beside her down the tiled hallway.  The lockers were new, but that's not surprising.  They had just changed them when she arrived in this school, and by her senior year they were already well used.  Pausing by the library she looked through the window and remembered scenes of terror, crawling into the ceiling with her best friends and waiting for hours for help to come.  It was all still here-Ken, Ash, Erik.  Belle and all the others, still living their lives in the most dramatic way possible. 
Upstairs, a she could hear a light rain beginning to fall on the roof.  Deliberately starting near the math classrooms she wandered from one to another, remembering hours of tortuously struggling with numbers that would never make sense to her, hearing the echos of "you won't have a calculator in your pocket for the rest of your life."  She smiled and touched her cellphone, wondering at how far we've come from playing snake and paying 25 cents a text. 
She had saved the science wing for last, wondering if she would feel anything- remember any more when standing there.  The theater had always been her home, her safe space, but somehow so many of her memories began here.  A refrain of an old song came drifting back to her, she wondered if students still went caroling around school twice a year celebrating an obscure holiday based around a really really big number.  She couldn't remember what her chem teacher looked like, or his name even.  It was all lost in the fog of time.  She could remember the notebook though, an old fivestar one with pockets.  They had passed it up and down the row whenever the ghost teacher wasn't looking.  In it were her dreams of romance, the names of boys that she was too afraid to actually talk to but could giggle about with her closest friends.  Back when her biggest dreams had been about her first kiss.  Back when she still thought that Grey's Anatomy and Gone With the Wind were proper guides to relationships.  She had always imagined being swept off her feet by the first man she ever fell for and then living happily ever after-if not that a bittersweet ending with a man staring wistfully after her plane as it departed; "here's looking at you kid."  Her world was Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Here, in this room it was almost like being back there again. 
And it all started with the notebook. Her life in the book was so dramatic, shared with her closest friends.  Teenage pregnancies, car crashes, boyfriends cruelly murdered.  Back when real life needed spicing up. 
Would she change any of it?  If she had known what was to come?  If she knew she would cease to be the perfect student, would fall into the darkest moments of her life when no one was around to turn on the light.  That she would find herself in a place where the people who claimed love were grinding her beneath their shoes and laughing at her screams.  Would she go back and tell herself to live in the moment, to be happily tortured by the fact that she was too shy to tell a boy that she liked him? That getting cast in the chorus again wasn't the end of the world.
No.  If she could, she would keep quiet.  She would let the notebook lie, full of adventures that the authors dreamt up out of a need for adrenaline in this sleepy island community.  The song faded and with it so did Meredith.  Confined now to the few pages in a notebook that is probably lost to time.  Clicking out of the classroom, I hurry downstairs and down the corridor to reality. 
I love this world that I live in, but some days I miss her- and the moments when I didn't know anything beyond pinning for a kind of romance that I did not understand. 

Bathtub confessions

I think I’m gonna marry you.
I mean, I’ve thought forever for a long time- but it was a wish, then a curse. I feel for the charm but I remember holding you through the tears- even if you don’t. Years of hurt- needlessly because you and I were speaking different languages with the same tongue. I didn’t want to hurt you- would have, could have waited. But if I had. Would it have been enough? I was still so broken, you would have become my anchor and my whole happiness in a way that would have spelled the begging of the end. And so now here we are.
I want it all forever.  The goofy jokes and the sweet way you wrap your arms around me, your patience even when I can’t concentrate and I’m trying to remember the most complicated steps to the dance rather than starting at the beginning. I trust that when me hair catches on fire, you’ll slap it it out without thinking of your own hands.
I trust you to tell me when things are not ok.
I trust you to be the first person who hasn’t screamed and shouted to get their way.
It’s been almost a year, and when you walked back into my life I think I knew what it meant, I knew for years.
2.5 years ago I was in an ok place. I was with someone who purportedly adored me, probably the sweetest of any of them, despite the reasons it all ended. And even in the middle of all that you were in my dreams. Night after night, I couldn’t get you out of my head.
I told my friend, driving out to take care of her pony- turned to her in the seat next to me and said “I’m not sure if I believe in soulmates, but if he’s not mine in this life in a past one he was.”
Dear god babe, it’s been you forever and ever.
It’s been so easy to fall into every day life, to adventure and travel and stay home and cuddle. My life hasn’t stopped, my world continues to turn but I like it better when I know I get to talk to you at the end of my day.
So yes, I suppose on paper it’s only been a few months- but in reality it’s been more than a decade. Remember when you asked me to wait wayyyy back when? I thought it was a ploy, but it was genuine. If I had waited 2 months, I could have saved 11 years. And yet, I wouldn’t be me- I would be a derivation of you.
So maybe It’s time to say it with more certainty what I’ve known this whole time.
You’re the only one who could ever have all of my heart. Everyone else has always been second best.
I’m gonna marry you.

Garden of Eden

The coffee shop is so crowded with kids on lunch break between classes. Funny calling them kids, when I moved here they were contemporaries. Now, crossing the streets by the college is an exercise in eye rolling frustration and dodging hipsters absorbed in their ethically dubious iPhones. Walking here was unexpectedly nerve wracking. I thought I was ready- prepared. I compartmentalized work and my relationship from this meeting. I arranged with my best friend to call halfway through lunch. i wore a dress that was simple but not overly flattering. I told him- actually I asked.
“Do you mind if I meet an old friend from college? I should tell you that we’ve been more than friends, and in the past he meant a lot to me.”
“Do what you want.”

Do what I want. I wanted to prove that I could move on. To reconnect and realize that the spark was just nostalgia, and that now I’m a mature woman. And maybe, a tiny part of me wanted to see him. Ask how he was- if he had a girlfriend, or fiancé, or wife.

I wasn’t ready when I saw him. All of my planning and I walked out onto the street, fake pregnant belly in place- a basket on my arm and the perspiration of false labor in my arm pits. He glanced up and pointed at the phone-
“I was following you.”
My manager shoots me a look, clearly confirming that she will call security right here and now if I am unsafe. How to explain- can I explain?
“I need to change, I’ll meet you in a minute?” As we walk away I’m already assuring her that this was planned, just an old friend from college. Just a friend.

Who exactly am I trying to convince?

When I first saw him I thought that maybe I could leave it all behind. He’s not the way I remember- or maybe I’ve grown into myself. In the dressing room I wrap my hair in a kerchief and brush the powder off my neck. History problems. He doesn’t know that- it must be strange for him and yet it’s so normal to my existence.

Back out on the street and my confidence plummets. How is it that I can present a program to 50 people, I can cry or fake a contraction or answer questions about legal intricacies and yet all of a sudden my insides are writhing like I’m 18 all over again. Butterflies- is that what these are? It’s been so long I can’t tell.

He tells me he’s a Captain now. I can’t help it- I laugh and am filled with instant regret. I try to explain about calling him by one of Jane Austen’s invented names a million years ago, that that fictional person was also a captain. I’m making everything so much worse. My body tries to close the gap between us but I stay stubbornly two feet away on the sidewalk. I think if someone had a knife you could slice the tension in the space between us.

We order our coffees and lunches and find a seat. Why did I only get soup? I am never nervous about eating in front of the man I’m dating- I don’t much care what he thinks of me. For some reason though, in this moment I want to be attractive. Am I trying to show him what he missed? Prove that I’m more a woman than I was before? I’m leaning in across the table and my fingers are making slow rings around the neck of my Nantucket Nectar. I realize that I want the bottle to be his lips. I don’t stop.

My phone buzzes as we eat our food.
“Are you ok? Do you need an out?”
“All good- thanks for checking!” I’m not all good. I’m writhing internally and my face is probably visibly flushing. We’re talking about everything- about nothing. I can’t tell you what were saying even as the words come out of my mouth. I’m drowning in blue eyes. You’d think I would have learned by now to bring a life jacket. My phone tells me it’s time to clock in and go back to work. I silence it, clock in, and keep sitting there. My afternoon is free and I don’t want this to end.

Finally I can’t avoid the fact that I am under the pretense of working today. We slide out and start the walk back to town, my feet wanting to drag a little with each step. As we get back to the Main Street I notice that I have closed the distance between us, and that I’m smiling all the way to my eyes. I haven’t smiled like that in years, it’s a concerted effort to stop but the streets have eyes here. Walking back to the office and I turn, not sure how to say goodbye. If this is the last time forever, there are so many things I want to say. I say
“The blacksmith is around the corner- let me know if you need help finding anything else in the city!”
I walk away, glancing back over my shoulder and seeing him disappear around the red kitchen building.

My dressing room is mercifully empty. I close the door and lean against it, sliding slowly down to rest on the floor. Am I breathing? I’m gasping. I haven’t felt like this in years. Not in a decade. I’m talking but it’s not a nonsensical babble, “oh my god- oh my god!” I fan myself with my hands, well aware that I have maybe ten minutes to pull myself together before someone comes back to the room. I try to push it back into its compartment, the neat box I’ve constructed in my mind. The lid won’t fit.

In the course of an hour, my entire world had gone off center. Someone pulled the covers off and woke me up like my father used to do when I was late for school. Now I’m looking at my life from outside, watching myself settle with being content. Watching me give up on the only dream I ever had- falling hopelessly in love.

But it’s not real. It can’t be. It was just lunch.

I stand and look at myself in the mirror. I’m still the same on the outside. If I ignore the fire in my chest, it will eventually extinguish. I lick my lips and taste the last of the lemon aid.

It’s too late. I took the apple and bit into it, and now for my sins I must live with the knowledge of my own naked emotions. It’s always been him. It’ll always be him.

Heart over mind

The brain is a funny complicated thing.
I spent years denying what was happening to me in the moment.
Years believing a narrative that I knew cognitively was impossible.
And then, when I could believe that it happened- I didn’t believe it was me. I spent so long calling myself a liar that though I could believe others and their experiences, I still thought it wasn’t real. That if someone holds you down and fucks you against your will, tells you they like it when you’re crying from the pain, it’s rape.
The other bits are complicated.
I remember being pushed down on the snow and the ice, but I still don’t know what happened. Only that I was told that if I didn’t get up quickly I would be the cause, at fault, the reason someone else got in trouble.
My brain made pathways, forged connections.
I learned that silence meant infidelity. I learned that asking someone where they were meant lies. I learned that the insecure voice in my head was always right.


So.
Did you know it takes hundreds of good connections to get rid of one bad one? And there are a lot of bad connections to re-write. But each time it does get a little easier. And the best part is that I’m doing this hard work on my own, because it’s mine to do. I’m not constantly asking for the validation, the love- I’m taking it when freely given (and reveling in how often it is gifted.) I’ve only had to say something once- and that was the dream. That awful horrible nightmare that I already lived once with someone else, But even in that there is Hope.
When it was real I thought I would crumble- but I didn’t. I didn’t because it was the wrong person in the wrong place and time. In my dream it was worse, so so much worse. Because this is the right person, the right time.
But that’s when I realized that unlike before, it’s just a dream.  I did the thing that I always wanted to do- I woke up. I called the love of my life. And it was ok, because it has never been our reality- and it won’t be. He could break me worse than I’ve ever broken but for the first time since the first time I can trust that he won’t.

The brain is a beautiful thing- it’s slowly helping me to heal the oldest and deepest wounds of my heart. So important, because I’ll never go back to who I was before but I won’t carry myself forward in pieces anymore. Now I know that I’m in the right time and place with the right person. He’s introducing me to his family as his girlfriend- sure it seems a little thing but if they’re shocked and ready to ask when the wedding is, maybe it’s not so little after all. And maybe, it’s not just me picking up pieces. Maybe there’s a reason he hasn’t used those words with them for anyone else before. I know he wants to believe that this could have happened five years ago, we could be married with kids- and it’s true but because of this time, I’m more me than ever.

For the first time since I was 18 years old,
I’m doing the impossible
and falling in love with my whole heart.

Take that, brain.