I’ve written about him before over the years. I won’t apologize. Few people think I’m the romantic that I am. I don’t spread rose petals on the bed, mood music is fine, but little else. If such a condition exists, I’m an emotional romantic. Over the years, I have loved with great gusto. I’ve been hurt….damaged at times…..and as one might imagine, that’s altered the way I love.
I take sone responsibility for this. I’ve made some horrendous choices. I have a well-used used saying, that don’t I don’t regret WHAT I’ve done, just WHO I’ve done.
But Ive known love in my life Real love. Once. Just once. And if anyone even attempts to tell that what I felt from Monday night, August 30, 1971 to Tuesday, Septenber 4, 1973 was just puppy love ( Is that term even used anymore?), I tell them they’re crazy. A couple of shrinks have gotten an earful on this subject, too.
We were kids then, but now as a 57 year old woman I still know what I knew then.
You know, Love can be wonderful, capricious, nefarious, beautiful, painful. The lack of it, which often times is Heartache is physical. It’s an actual pain . It is with me anyway. It’s nothing that has killed me though I incompletely get how one can die from a broken heart.
i battle and have battled with insomnia for years. One night back in college while spending the night with my boyfriend, I decided to watch TV in the living room.
HBO.
And just as that discernible, dramatic 80’s network music finished —the one used by waaaaaay to many gymnasts in their floor routines, the feature movie at three AM was “Somewhere In Time”. I’m too tired right now to go into detail. But at the time I was 21 and had in the early stages of figuring out who I was and whar my place in the world was. Still pondering, but I digress. Fair warning— This is a spoiler alert, but Christopher Reeve was able to travel back in time to meet a woman, whose photo was in the hotel’s hall of honor. Well, she gives Jim a pocket watch first, which starts this whole process of tying to find her. He enters theHall of Honor and recognized het photo and immediately fell in love—once again. He manages to go back to 1910, the year they met, but after some post coital falderal, he finds a modern penny in his pocket and disappears in front of her, then he wakes up in the same room he exited this realm a week earlier.
Try as he might, he can’t go back in time again. So he decides to be with her in death, He starves himself and finally dues and waiting for him on a white cloudy soundstage in Hollywood, she’s there tomgreet him, looking young and gorgeous as he remembered her. She too continued to love him all her life. Even in death.
Now mind you, all this sadness is exacerbated by a gorgeous , but heart wrenching Paganini tune underscoring all the most poignant scenes.
Well, I’m crying like a baby and it’s one of those ugly, loud cries that’s more like my eyes are leaking streams. This wakes up the boyfriend. He runs in to see what’s happened and through my sobs, I tried to explain the movie and the ultimate romantic sacrifice that was made. He said something in Spanish then went back to bed. I remained on the sofa, trying to gain my composure.
i saw the movie again many years later. It’s still a 3:00 am featured movie. And thought it was incredibly hokey. I’m not jaded, I just have a better understand of how I love.
Back to the Junior High boyfriend. I was head over hills in love. I’ve yet to love like that again. Hand to God.. I know, first loves are always unforgettable and for a while there, I was trying to convince myself that I was idealizing the relationship, because it also coincided with a uniquely happy time in my life. But I’m rethinking that.
This was love. And in a weird way, it still is. He broke up with me without an explanation. On the phone mind you, and he never really never spoke to me again. I never got over that. He was like a chimera twin grieving out of my heart. Everywhere I went, he went. He was subconsciously the third person in most of my relationships. I survived and loved again, but it was never the same.
It hurt, but he was right to break up, regardless of the ridiculous reason. He was a year older and only wanted to leave his small South Texas town and get to work I wanted to go to college then get Walter Cronkite’s job. We were different people. Raised differently, grew up differently, but there was always that pesky emotion.
He got married, had kids……he even has grandkids, from what I hear.
We spoke for the first time in 2010 and it was a gift from th cosmos. We never saw each other, I didn’t want to impose on his life, anymore than phone conversations.
We spoke a couple of times and he finally explained why he broke up with me. I was gobsmacked by his answer, it was silly and he admitted that it was and the more he offered,, I could feel his memory’s hold on me exit my body. Then a sweet nostalgia took its place. He told me the words that every woman wants to hear. He said he too had thought about me over the years, had kept up with my career and told me that while he was happy and life was good but he never stopped loving me and would always love me. We admitted that despite everything that had happened in the world, in his world, in my world— despite the differences, we were the loves of each other’s lives. I understand now more than ever that those words were a gift. I thanked him. But At the time, I font thev dont think understood the relevance.
A friend saw him a few years ago, she told him that his conversations had liberated me and started seeing someone in the years since that first conversation since.. He cried. I’ll admit, I did too when she told me that, I’m not sure why either of us did.
Lastly, I’ve been doing more driving lately and in recent days Sirius has been killing me with music that was popular during the two years we were together. Just today, three songs played in a row and on sat stations that normally wouldn’t play these tunes. And all week long I’ve hearing songs and he’s been in my thoughts. I’m not quite sure what if anything this means, but these songs now well ovev40 years old sound the same, but the feel just a little bit sweeter.
The TV haracter, Frasier insists in his psychiatric myopia that there no such things as coincidences. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’m a believer in signs.
I don’t know why I’m hearing thesecsingscplated so often (even in stores) and they can stop me in their tracks. I don’t know if it they represent a message, a harbinger of things to come or what
Then again, it could mean that yes, I’m an even bigger romantic than I care to admit.
I truly hope he’s happy, and has a joyous good life and I hope his wife adores him as I did. I hope she too is a romantic. I wouldn’t take off points for the occasional use of rose petals.
a broken heart.
.
