Watersheds

Someone asked me a while ago, as he was looking to resolve a dilemma of his own, if I had ever been in love. Well, actually, what he asked was if I had ever been in love with more than one woman at once, to which I must confess that I have never been that ambitious. Or suicidal, for that matter.

Yet the basic question itself intrigues me and, the closer I am drawn to my own mortality, the greater the compulsion I feel to examine it. Like iron filings pulled inexorably to a magnet, I find myself pulled, in some ways unwillingly, back to the notion. I have, I suppose, been in love many times in my life; certainly, at the time I was with them, I have loved every woman I have dated. Yet I can not say that any of them was the one. If I were going to be completely honest, I would have to admit that, in the truest sense of being in love, of two individuals forming a complete whole in a union of two souls, I have only really been in love once.

Her name is unimportant. She was who she was, and to me she was my first love, the first girl I ever dated seriously. It would be easy, I suppose, to dismiss the whole thing as an idealization, as all first loves are idealized. But I know myself well enough, and I knew her well enough, to realize that wasn't the case, that there was a connection that can only truly be made once in a lifetime.

They say that intense circumstances can forge equally intense connections between people, and the circumstances under which she and I were dating were nothing if not intense. Perhaps that is why I find myself drawn back to this, even though it has long been over and I know that it can never be again. I suppose, in its own way, that is an idealization, but the truth of what was remains nonetheless.

When we first met, we were both in the 8th Grade and, yes, I know, but this isn't a story about puppy love. She had hair the colour of summer wheat and, despite the old saw about boys never making passes at girls who wear glasses, she was beautiful, sculpted by the finest artist who ever lived. She was new to the school and, at first, it really was an example of the awkward, self-conscious flirting that thirteen-year-olds go through. I was the football jock and she was the cheerleader and, by late Fall when football season had ended and basketball season had begun, we were past the tentative hesitancy and considered a pair by ourselves and our peers. Little did we know, at the time, what the rest of the year held in store for us.

For a lot of reasons, a few good and many not, I always carried myself as if I were older than I was. She, too, had a self-possession that was beyond her years, and perhaps that was a part of the attraction. There was an inner peace and strength about her that defied description, that even allowed her to survive unscathed that embarrassing moment when my parents met her and my mother informed her that her breasts were too large and her butt was too big. Mom certainly had a way with words, but she managed to brush that off with no more than a laugh about it later. And perhaps that, too, was also part of the attraction.

All things considered, the 8th Grade was not a good year. My 14th birthday coincided with our Spring Break, which meant the annual pilgrimage to Palm Beach with my mother and brother. I will never forget, near the end of the break, receiving that phone call at the hotel informing me that two of my friends had been killed in a stupid accident. Both of them were two classes ahead of me, and they and a third kid had been drag racing on the Outer Drive. The kid driving had lost control of the car, bounced off the car he'd been racing, jumped the median and slammed head-on into a third car. Not only was the entire family in that car wiped out, but my two friends had been ejected from their car and into the pavement. The only survivor was the kid who had been driving.

Aside from the deaths of my uncle and my grandparents, which I had been too young to understand at the time, this was my first experience with death, not to mention violent death. Unfortunately, though I was yet to know it, it would be far from my last. But she was there for me when I rushed home, to comfort me, hold me, tell me it would be okay. It wouldn't be, but neither of us knew that yet. It was only the end of March; there were two more whole months for disaster to strike.

In April, my father and I were in a car accident in Ohio, on our way to visit my brother in college. I was very nearly thrown through the windshield - which was when I learned the very important lesson of always wearing your seatbelt - and my father, attempting to cover my body with his, broke his knee on the dashboard. A minor injury that would prove to have consequences far out of proportion to the damage inflicted.

She didn't come to my house that May morning when my father died, even though I lived two bocks from the school. Unlike my best friend, who did ditch school the moment he heard, that was something she just wouldn't do. She was a good girl, and she wouldn't leave school before the day was over. But it didn't matter. In my haze and, finally, unable to stay any longer in that house on that day, I left. And, in my aimless wandering, driven by something I still have no words for, my best friend and I found ourselves at the school, just as classes were letting out for the day.

And she was there. I caught her as she was leaving the building, finally heading for my house. She was halfway down the entranceway stairs when I saw her and she saw me, and it was like the world stopped. The throng of people on the stairs parted, like a curtain drawn back by invisible hands, and she was there, a shining beacon in the afternoon Sun. Suddenly, I found that I could not move, could not speak, that I had become as immobile and mute as the bricks of the building. But it didn't matter, there were no words needed at all, and she came to me, a study of effortless grace in motion. She put her arms around me, drew my head to her chest, saying nothing at all but freely giving me everything she had, and the more I cried, finally, the harder she held on to me. Among all those silent, hushed people standing around us, we were alone, just the two of us in a world to ourselves. She took my pain onto herself and, while she couldn't bear the unbearable for me, she could share it, and she never even hesitated.

I can say, truthfully, that she saved me, and she did it willingly and without complaint. In all honesty, I became something of a son-of-a-bitch in the next two years, and beyond. Not that I was mean, but I learned a lesson that morning that no child should ever have to face, and it resulted in my pushing the limits to test my own mortality. I had been quiet and moody before, but I was moreso after. All teenagers, I suppose, are rebellious to one degree or another, but to say that I would find situations in which to push things to an extreme would be an understatement. Not all the time, mind you, but there would come the day where I would just kind of snap and give in to the blackness that always lurked in the back of my mind since that day.

And she would always pull me out of it, would snatch me back from the abyss I wanted to hurl myself into. She was, in truth, the only one who could, who could dispell the night and calm the storm with a word or the touch of her hand. She was the sunlight that follows the tempest, my anchor and sanctuary and the promise that there were still good things in a world that cared nothing for nor particularly noted anyone. Her love was unconditional and she freely gave to me the strength I did not have, and the only thing she asked for in return was me. I know it now and I knew it then, but I owe her a debt I can never repay and that, too, is perhaps why her memory still casts such a spell on me.

We were inseparable for the next two years, to the point that our friends would joke that we should just exchange rings and get it over with. In retrospect, because of her, some of the worst years of my life were also some of the best. I would be a lesser man had she never been in my life. But all good things inevitably come to an end, and no good deed ever goes unpunished. Because of her father's career, she and her family moved to southern California just before the start of our Junior year.

That last Summer we spent together was bittersweet beyond measure. As much as we tried to pretend that the inevitable wasn't looming closer with every day, the more we became aware of it. I'd say that she didn't want to go, but that would be a conceit and untrue; rather, she didn't want to leave me behind. She was fully aware of what my home life was like. After all, she'd picked up the pieces, put me back together, and insisted that I stay at her house often enough. There were plenty of times that Summer that she would plead with me, tears in her eyes, to break my ties to Chicago and go with her to California. But that was just a fantasy, a pleasant one, to be sure, because no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't. Whatever held me here then holds me here to this day, a sense of unfinished business and, no matter where I have roamed since, I always find myself drawn back here.

And that, too, is perhaps why she is still such a siren's call for me, the idea of what could have been but was not, an ending that came before it was meant to be. Except for one brief moment years later, something else that was unexpected and ended all too soon, that Summer was the last time I saw her. I have no idea what happened to her in the decades since, but to me she will always remain as she was in those years we were together. While I grow old and wither, she shall always be in the flower of youth, wise and strong beyond her years, the woman who saved me from myself. She was, in truth, magic in the purest sense of that word, and I can not ever forget her. If there is, indeed, a God and if He is just, then I can only hope that He has seen fit to reward her with the kind of life she tried to give to me. I certainly know that the world is a better place for her having been in it, and that my own life has been lessened without her.