When I met him, I was awe struck. He was gorgeous; that tanned, blue eyed, toned, sleek good looking so often accommodating surfers and singers. Alas, he was neither. But he was there, in front of me and smiling and not seeing me. It would be three more years before he would say my name. But, he stood there with me, with others and came to a business arrangement and then came to work in my yard, in my view, for the next few weeks.
Who was I then? I was that girl without hope. I was still tied into that first tumultuous relationship with AZ, I was still trapped, still fettered to him. I was so lost, so unsure of who I was, so positive that my worth was so little.
He didn't see me, as I said before. Sure, he looked at me, smiled at me, said 'hello' and 'how are you', but he didn't see me. But he and I were different people then, just as we are different people now.
Every day he was there, in my yard, working. I've said he was gorgeous and every day he was there with his shirt off and his skin gleaming, I was drawn to the window, prone to looking out at him and allowing my mind to wander in between chores around the house.
You know how you can just tell someone is looking at you? You can feel that burning on your skin, the hair on your neck crawls, that whisper in the back of your mind? I must have been so quiet even in those ways because he never saw my longing glances nor the moving of the curtains, he never once turned and looked in my direction. He just worked. In my imagination, the writer's nook of my mind, I was wondering what he was thinking, where his mind was all those hours he worked. To be alone with your thoughts for so long, surely his mind was wandering, I wanted to know where.
AZ was angry, bitter with jealousy, positive that I would invite him in and betray AZ. The thought was so ludicrous, he couldn't see me. And then he left and then he vanished from my sight and my reality and entered my dreams. Being that I have an overactive imagination, when I go to sleep at night, I often allow my mind to play with ideas of things that will probably never happen. In that hour, while I drifted to sleep, I thought of him. It is so easy to fantasize about the unattainable, to replay those same moments over and over in your head changing the script, changing the movements, changing the looks. And he became the man of my dreams, the man I invested my fantasies into, who smiled at me and brushed the hair from my forehead before he brushed it with his lips.
AZ left, the musician moved to Chicago, NY came and went, and all the while I dreamt of someone else. He held me while I slept, he smiled at me, he took my hand and pulled me to him, his blue eyes bore into me when he spoke while I was sleeping. But when I awoke, I went back to reality, where he didn't know my name.
Then I moved back. I left NY (the person, not the city) and moved back. And circumstances threw me back into his world. His altered world. In the three years that had past since I had last seen him, he had been through a relationship and had a child. When I moved back, I learned through his mother of how he had been, what he had been doing. It was part of my reconditioning to moving back to the place I had lived before.
His mother hired me to work with her which saved me in so many ways. She has saved me in so many ways over the years and I am so lucky to know her and count her as a friend. So, she gave me a job which is like gold when you are broke and have a newborn baby. While we worked, we talked and when she talked she sometimes mentioned him and I would listen hungrily for anything about him. A few weeks later, she brought his son with us, he had needed a babysitter and she had offered. And then she asked me if I would be interested in watching his son because he was in dire need of someone to do it. There were two reasons I jumped on this offer. The first was the fact that I needed the money so desperately and the second was that I was still holding out to see him again. But it would be weeks before he would come to pick him up. I remember the day, I remember that I was nervous. My children were there, Triniti in her swing on the porch near my mother and his mother who were smoking cigarettes and talking. Amanda and Emilee and his son ran around the yard playing and I was cleaning up the mess from dinner. I had the door open and I was watching the kids. My hair, several inches longer than it is now, was in a braid down my back. I finished in the kitchen a few minutes before he got there. I walked out onto the porch and sat on a stair halfway down and lit a cigarette. It was a nice day, mid-Summer and cool, and I was watching the kids play their game when I heard his truck door shut. My stomach muscles tightened with that unfamiliar nervousness, but I stayed where I was and waited to see him appear again in my reality.
continued...
Labels: History Lesson
