Chapter 2: Even If We’re 92
A teenage soulmate, love letters and roses, distance, heartbreak, and a vow that echoes even now.
It was an amazing love story, at least from my point of view. My parents weren’t thrilled. They wanted me with a jock. Little did they know that the jocks at my high school were rapists and assholes.
The soulmate wasn’t that, but he was the one I gave my virginity to. I say gave, because that’s exactly what it was, a choice. I wanted to, and I have zero regrets about my first time.
It was the 80s, so our parents were never home. We had a safe place, unlike a lot of people. But once I had a car, that became our place.
His best friend once accused us of having a relationship that was only about sex, but that was deeply untrue. There was so much more. There was the rose I carried every Friday. There was the deep, spiritual connection that led us to each other at the most bizarre times and in the most bizarre ways. There were love letters and grand gestures. He did the most amazing, romantic things to get my attention and to make me feel special. I can still see them in my mind.
There were so many layers to our romance. And then he moved to another city hours away to live with his mom. The intention was for us to stay together, but I wrote a letter that said I didn’t want to do long distance. The reality is, as a habitual monogamist, someone else had stepped in to fill the space he’d created by moving.
Apparently, and stupidly, I might add, he chose to read that letter while riding his bicycle. He got sideswiped by a car, broke his leg in multiple places, and somehow interpreted it as a message from the universe: he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So he moved back home.
I remember the day he returned. He had a cast from his toe to the very top of his hip. I was so glad he was back, and yet so upset that he had left. When I got out of my car and looked at him, I didn’t know what to say.
He broke the silence with, “What you want to do is slap me.”
Of course, I refused, but he insisted. And once I did, I felt so much better.
I remember exactly where we were, in front of his house at the crest of a hill, the horizon stretched out behind him. That image is burned into my mind.
And then he said: “We are meant to be. I know it with every cell of my body. Even if it’s not until we’re 92, we will be together.”
And you know what? I still think he’s right.