M’s Thoughts on Discovering her High School Sweetheart is Married

Found out tonight in my 26th year what I have known since 17. That the first love of my life, the one who took my virginity, and I would not get married. We would not live out the stereotypical clichéd story of high school sweethearts, together until a ripe old age when one of us dies only to be followed by the other, killed by heartbreak, two weeks later.

Why is this bothering me? I have always known you will not belong to me. I didn’t want you to. In fact, the brutal truth is that I haven’t even thought of you since sometime around 2000 when I saw a picture of you in an old yearbook. Sure we remained friends, peripherally. Geographically serperated with you in Colorado and me in New York, mountains and skyscrapers, was little reason for the verge. We were for a moment and that was all that we were meant for.

So why is this bothering me? Is it because you knew her for four weeks, just one month, a mere 28 days and then just jumped the gun shotgun style and married her in a hurry? Is it because I am worried about your future happiness with a woman you barely know?

More than likely it is because, in the true un-altruistic nature of my personality I have inverted it into a definition of how alone I am. Your marrage is a magnification of my place in life. My singular, solo place, in which I date, I latch on to a three year-and-going love-affair and give my heart to someone I know in the back of my mind will never ever belong to me. Is it because I see myself as I waste away into spinste hood carrying my status of ‘alone’ like an albatross around my neck weighing me down.

Your marriage makes me want to go out and buy orthopedic shoes. Big, chunky, ugly brown shoes which my 101 (for good luck) cats will fight over, devouring the leather in hunger as my rotting corpse decays in the corner to be found only months later when the smell becomes overbearing. My last thought will be of the children I never had.

Or worse I will marry out of anticipation and fear of being alone. I wil marry because the pressure of age becomes to great and I will have to fight the sadness everyday of my life knowing that I made the wrong choice, regretting what my life could have been. My husband will be fat and cruel and lazy just because I was too afraid to be alone. I will live everyday a dual life: what exists and what I wish was reality. I will go mad with angry remorse and kill myself, to be found bya fat, cruel, lazy someone who doesn’t care.

Found alone or found without emotion. They hover in balanced equilibrium. The weight of each representing my grand failures which your marriage has placed upon the scales..

Do you remember the first time we had sex? That was one cliché we brought to fruition. A twilight lit summer night, the drive in movies, me sixteen and unaware of my own flesh. In the backseat of your car,my shirt pulled up and pants pulled down, three quick pumps and it was over as if it never happened. I remember thinking “It should hurt.” When it didn’t I didn’t blame the quickness or size of your endowment, instead I answered with the idealism of innocence “It is because it is right.”

Do you remember how I kept looking in the mirror on the way home. You thought it was vanity or maybe just nerves. I wanted to know if I looked different, if sex had changed me. Would my parents know, was sex written on my face?

They didn’t know. That was the only time. Shortly after we broke up. You ave me the first experience of heartbreak. The first in a long line. It tastes bitter in my mouth. Like metal and limes. I remember when you told me I thought “your voice sounds too sad, like chicken soup,” and I hated you for that.

For a year after we barely spoke. You graduated and began to stalk me. You pulled a gun on me, stole my car and house keys, wuld leave little gifts in the vackseat, filled the entire interior compartement with roses. I cried constantly.

Then I left for college and you were no longer near enough to matter. But your father died and I came back. We hugged and somehow everything was okay. We still, to this point, talk occasionally. But this is most likely the final chapter.

Maybe that is why I am sad. It shows time, it shows my age, your age. It excacerabtes the flow of time and my inability to hold on to my youth. I no longer know you and you no longer know me.

You called my dad second. You two always got along and after your father passed you held him in high regard. He became your second father. He was the second call after you mother, before even your brother or sister. I wonder, when will you call me? What should my reaction be?

I know this answer. Ths one is clear and obvious. I will be happy and congratulate you. I will wish you a happy future, together with someone, not alone, passing time until one day you will be found by her and she will be distraught. Your children will be distraught and a million prayers will go to you and all of the happy. You will have lived a happy life. And me. Always un-altruistic me-I wil cry with my cats and trudge to the garden in my orthopedic shoes to plant you a flower that blooms annualy.