Mythic

And on her birthday, we held each other close, floating naked, faces upturned, beneath an infinitely deep sky.
A sky weeping hot orange tears.
And we loved.

This is a love story.

I adored her.  35 years ago.

She was the kind of opposite sex friend everyone should have in college.

She was beautiful.  Soulful.  Deep brown eyes.  Clever and quick witted, the center of a thriving social scene.  Interested in everything around her.  Difficult to make laugh but when you did, it was so worth it.

We talked.  A lot.  About everything.  On the phone, mostly.  Her word for what we were doing was mindfucking.  It drove my roommates crazy.  Me too, you can imagine.

We never hooked up.  She friendzoned me.  She had good reasons.

I wasn't happy about it.  My 20 year old ego was bruised.  I was, in fact,  kinda pissy about it.

She drove me home from her house in her yellow Beetle (that she had repainted - yellow :) after things came to a head, not talking much.  I remember just staring out of the window.  We got to my house and we agreed - maybe we shouldn't talk for a couple of days.  Two days.  Not before 2 o'clock.

I thought about her over that two days.  A lot.

We were friends first, I realized. We were undeniably attracted to each other, but mostly I just liked her.  Everything about her,

The sound of her voice.  Talking to her.  The sardonic wit.  Her approach to the world.  The way her eyebrows would raise, and she would purse her lips and cock her head a little, always seemingly on the edge of that laugh!

Everything, of course, short of the fact that she wouldn't drop into bed with me on the back of my clumsy efforts.

I wanted to be her friend still.

It was maybe the first really mature decision I ever made.

Two o'clock on Friday approached, and I was kind of a wreck.  Would she still talk to me at all?  What was going through her mind?  I was sitting by the phone from 1 on, keeping my mates off of it.

At 1:50 the phone rings -

The first thing I hear:  "Time is all just relative anyway, don't you think?".

And I fell out.

We talked.  Of course we did.

And we agreed to be friends.

And still - I adored her.

We eventually let things go, as young mooks will do.  She had other boys; I had other girls.  And we really didn't appreciate what we had.  The communication, the affection, the attraction. the humor, the ease with each other.  Maybe we were both even a little afraid of it...

A lot of time passed.  And a lot of pain and heartache for us both.  I wouldn't say that either one of us was trying to recapture what we had then, or anything.  Or even, exactly, knew that it was missing.

But we do now.

She's so much more now than she was then.

And, again, I adore her.