(I would like to start by apologizing, I'm writing this while on the verge of passing out, but I promised to write, so bear with me)
It takes a lot to get me to talk.
Correction. I talk a lot. I talk too much, it takes a lot to get me to talk about anything serious, especially at any sort of length.
So we were relatively slow at work, and where I sit there's me and three other guys. Eric, my good friend (Who last night proved to be a great friend), Michael, and Joe.
Eric is married with a pending divorce. Michael and Joe are recently married to their respective wives. We were standing around, and the three of them were discussing love. All of us are artists in some regard, so all of us standing around talking about love, it's not so strange.
I stayed on the outskirts, listening in on the conversation. Eric claims to have never loved his wife (He bitterly hates her for getting custody of their son) and Michael and Joe of course love their wives.
So Joe asks me, "Have you ever been in love?"
Maybe it's just because it was a slow day at work. Maybe it's because before that I wrote 4 or 5 pages on the very subject before the conversation even started. But I started talking.
I said I have said 'I love you' many times. I told it to Teresa, my first girlfriend, because what do 15 year olds know about love? I said it to Mandy in high school, who doesn't love their high school sweetheart? I said it to Shaina, and I said it to her when I asked her to marry me. I said it to Caroline as more of a 'well we've been together long enough, I guess we're in love.'
All of those were long term relationships. They all lasted over a year.
Then I got to my point. Only once, have I been madly in love. Consumed with love, to the point where it wasn't some bubbly heartwarming thing I said at the end of conversations. Once, and only once, have I ever uttered the words 'I love you' and meant it. I mean really meant it.
Her name was Pam. We went to high school together my junior year. She had just moved from North Carolina. She was small, skinny, real energetic personality. She was the first girl I ever knew who had a piercings other than her ear. She didn't shave her legs and refused, absolutely refused to hold hands in the hallway.
We dated for maybe a week, and nothing really came of it. We ended things, remained friends, and then Pam moved back to North Carolina at the end of junior year.
That's the first half of the story.
We promised to keep in touch, and miraculously we did for 4 years. When I made it to college we made plans to meet up, plans that never really went anywhere and were constantly fizzling out. During our correspondence I failed out of school, had a disastrous string of relationships and equally bad jobs. While I was working at a Christian bookstore I got a call while I was at work.
It was Pam. She was in town, visiting her mother and a handful of old friends. We promised to meet up when my shift was over. Without me knowing she found where I worked and surprised me by showing up. It was late on a weeknight so there weren't any customers in the store. The girl stuck out, black tank top, plaid punk pants, and a body full of tattoos and piercings. She ran at me, jumped up, wrapped her arms and legs around me. We weren't awkward high school kids anymore. She had spent years traveling and moving, becoming fiercely independent, and at the time I was making 6.50 selling Bibles. She had come a longer way than I did.
So she stuck around for a bit, all of my co-workers were terrified, thinking the devil herself had walked through the door. She left to go meet up with a friend and promised to come by my house later.
She did come by, and we sat around, caught up. She showed me all of her tattoos and piercings. My two measly tattoos at the time were nothing compared to what she had accumulated. Instantly we were flirting, like it was second nature. I was nervous too, nervous to the point of almost shaking. Why was I like that around someone I've known for years? She was supposed to leave my house and go to a friends. She ended up staying at my house two nights in a row and never really made it to those friends.
The two nights after that we spent at her mother's house in middle-of-nowhere Mississippi. It was October and chilly. We sat on the porch, watched her dogs run about while we held on to each other for warmth. The flirting and playfulness kept evolving, and I didn't know what was happening. I was used to the slow burn of love, where you meet a girl and it takes time, lots and lots of time to get to that point.
And then, on our fourth day together, I had to leave. We stood in the driveway, pitch black night except there were stars, honest to god stars filling the sky. It was a cold night, and even in a hoodie she was still shaking so I held her close.
It was then that she asked me to move to Virginia with her. She wanted to take me away from everything that was dragging me down in Memphis and whisk me off to somewhere else. I held her close under the stars and said, "I love you." It didn't come out like a normal I love you, like the hundreds, maybe thousands I have thrown away in my life. My voice was shaking, my body was shaking, overcome with emotion and cold. She said it back, in the same tone, and we kissed a single kiss and parted.
I never made it to Virginia. I met a girl not long after back here and had to choose. I won't say I chose wrong but goddamn if I haven't been plagued with "what ifs" for so long.
Pam and I have been out of touch for two years and we never saw each other again.
The last thing I said to the guys at work was that I learned that night that you live with heartache, at least a little bit of it. You carry it around with you, and you promise, you promise yourself that you will never fall in love again. You won't set yourself up, it's painful and torturous. But love is madness, and an uncontrollable one at that. I said that I've been in long relationships and not once have I ever had a moment like that, a do-or-die moment, where you're not just saying you love someone just because you're together, but because you might never be together again, and it hurts to say it, and it hurts when it's gone, but goddamn just imagine what it would feel like never saying it, skipping that opportunity.
And I promised myself that was the love I would spend the rest of my time looking for. The kind of love that books are written about. That Kerouac spoke of in On The Road, that Holden Caulfield talks of in Catcher in the Rye. Not high school puppy love, but real honest-to-God love that can make you feel euphoric as much as it can make a permanent, twisted fist in your stomach.
Now after saying all of that everyone just kind of stopped. I joke around a lot, I'm incredibly sarcastic. No one ever expects me to go into an intense monologue about love. There were looks of surprise all around, and Eric whispered, "Shit, I want that."
I just sat down and went back to writing.
Every story is a love story if it's told right.
It takes a lot to get me to talk.
Correction. I talk a lot. I talk too much, it takes a lot to get me to talk about anything serious, especially at any sort of length.
So we were relatively slow at work, and where I sit there's me and three other guys. Eric, my good friend (Who last night proved to be a great friend), Michael, and Joe.
Eric is married with a pending divorce. Michael and Joe are recently married to their respective wives. We were standing around, and the three of them were discussing love. All of us are artists in some regard, so all of us standing around talking about love, it's not so strange.
I stayed on the outskirts, listening in on the conversation. Eric claims to have never loved his wife (He bitterly hates her for getting custody of their son) and Michael and Joe of course love their wives.
So Joe asks me, "Have you ever been in love?"
Maybe it's just because it was a slow day at work. Maybe it's because before that I wrote 4 or 5 pages on the very subject before the conversation even started. But I started talking.
I said I have said 'I love you' many times. I told it to Teresa, my first girlfriend, because what do 15 year olds know about love? I said it to Mandy in high school, who doesn't love their high school sweetheart? I said it to Shaina, and I said it to her when I asked her to marry me. I said it to Caroline as more of a 'well we've been together long enough, I guess we're in love.'
All of those were long term relationships. They all lasted over a year.
Then I got to my point. Only once, have I been madly in love. Consumed with love, to the point where it wasn't some bubbly heartwarming thing I said at the end of conversations. Once, and only once, have I ever uttered the words 'I love you' and meant it. I mean really meant it.
Her name was Pam. We went to high school together my junior year. She had just moved from North Carolina. She was small, skinny, real energetic personality. She was the first girl I ever knew who had a piercings other than her ear. She didn't shave her legs and refused, absolutely refused to hold hands in the hallway.
We dated for maybe a week, and nothing really came of it. We ended things, remained friends, and then Pam moved back to North Carolina at the end of junior year.
That's the first half of the story.
We promised to keep in touch, and miraculously we did for 4 years. When I made it to college we made plans to meet up, plans that never really went anywhere and were constantly fizzling out. During our correspondence I failed out of school, had a disastrous string of relationships and equally bad jobs. While I was working at a Christian bookstore I got a call while I was at work.
It was Pam. She was in town, visiting her mother and a handful of old friends. We promised to meet up when my shift was over. Without me knowing she found where I worked and surprised me by showing up. It was late on a weeknight so there weren't any customers in the store. The girl stuck out, black tank top, plaid punk pants, and a body full of tattoos and piercings. She ran at me, jumped up, wrapped her arms and legs around me. We weren't awkward high school kids anymore. She had spent years traveling and moving, becoming fiercely independent, and at the time I was making 6.50 selling Bibles. She had come a longer way than I did.
So she stuck around for a bit, all of my co-workers were terrified, thinking the devil herself had walked through the door. She left to go meet up with a friend and promised to come by my house later.
She did come by, and we sat around, caught up. She showed me all of her tattoos and piercings. My two measly tattoos at the time were nothing compared to what she had accumulated. Instantly we were flirting, like it was second nature. I was nervous too, nervous to the point of almost shaking. Why was I like that around someone I've known for years? She was supposed to leave my house and go to a friends. She ended up staying at my house two nights in a row and never really made it to those friends.
The two nights after that we spent at her mother's house in middle-of-nowhere Mississippi. It was October and chilly. We sat on the porch, watched her dogs run about while we held on to each other for warmth. The flirting and playfulness kept evolving, and I didn't know what was happening. I was used to the slow burn of love, where you meet a girl and it takes time, lots and lots of time to get to that point.
And then, on our fourth day together, I had to leave. We stood in the driveway, pitch black night except there were stars, honest to god stars filling the sky. It was a cold night, and even in a hoodie she was still shaking so I held her close.
It was then that she asked me to move to Virginia with her. She wanted to take me away from everything that was dragging me down in Memphis and whisk me off to somewhere else. I held her close under the stars and said, "I love you." It didn't come out like a normal I love you, like the hundreds, maybe thousands I have thrown away in my life. My voice was shaking, my body was shaking, overcome with emotion and cold. She said it back, in the same tone, and we kissed a single kiss and parted.
I never made it to Virginia. I met a girl not long after back here and had to choose. I won't say I chose wrong but goddamn if I haven't been plagued with "what ifs" for so long.
Pam and I have been out of touch for two years and we never saw each other again.
The last thing I said to the guys at work was that I learned that night that you live with heartache, at least a little bit of it. You carry it around with you, and you promise, you promise yourself that you will never fall in love again. You won't set yourself up, it's painful and torturous. But love is madness, and an uncontrollable one at that. I said that I've been in long relationships and not once have I ever had a moment like that, a do-or-die moment, where you're not just saying you love someone just because you're together, but because you might never be together again, and it hurts to say it, and it hurts when it's gone, but goddamn just imagine what it would feel like never saying it, skipping that opportunity.
And I promised myself that was the love I would spend the rest of my time looking for. The kind of love that books are written about. That Kerouac spoke of in On The Road, that Holden Caulfield talks of in Catcher in the Rye. Not high school puppy love, but real honest-to-God love that can make you feel euphoric as much as it can make a permanent, twisted fist in your stomach.
Now after saying all of that everyone just kind of stopped. I joke around a lot, I'm incredibly sarcastic. No one ever expects me to go into an intense monologue about love. There were looks of surprise all around, and Eric whispered, "Shit, I want that."
I just sat down and went back to writing.
Every story is a love story if it's told right.