She didn't love me. I was sure of this. But I thought that with roses, I could make her love me.
It was Valentine's Day. My first. With a girl. And I thought there should be roses.
And candles. So I bought her candles, and an oil lamp as well.
It was late afternoon by the time I got there. The sun was going down, and the sky had just started to turn an afterburning netherworldly purple.
"I brought you roses", I said to her.
She looked indifferently to me, as if I were one of the dishes she was washing in the sink as I walked into her living room.
"Oh, geez. You didn't have to, you know. I mean.."
"Yeah." I said back, punctuated with a period and not a comma. "I know what you mean."
"...Lets go down to the cellar, shall we?"
She dropped her dishes with one hand and grabbed mine with the other. With her mother glancing a cautious yet approving eye, she led me down to the cellar, past the beaded curtain and closing the door, separating our moment from the downward-cast eyes of the disapproving world around us.
"Kiss me," she said, straight and honest right out of those big brown eyes of hers.
"Why should I?" my constantly chaging blue-greens challenged her.
"Because you're sweet and you're here and I want you now." She demanded this of me.
"And what about tomorrow?"
She lit the candles I brought her. One by one around the basement. Over the mantle and on the stool down below to the concrete ground in a giant freaking circle.
She lit the oil lamp as a centerpiece on the table between us.
After she did so, she took a sharpie from the mug full of art supplies she hid on that very same table, and signed her name next to a heart on the outer left calf of my jeans.
"What of it?"
Before I had a chance to speak, she licked my ear. An ear which had never been licked before.
I tried to refute, but my mouth knew better than to open itself.
She would take me. For nine and a half hours, she would take me. And I would not fight it. For I was seventeen, and had dreamed about this moment for the past, oh, six or seven years or so.
I would let her take me and let her have her way with me and I would go along with it. Hell, if Odysseus could go along swept around the mediterannean for however many years and if Leopold Bloom could experience seven years in a day, surely I had the right to experience seven years in The Coming Of...whatever?... right?
"Surely," I thought in my virginal, newish, and naive-beyond-all-hell mind, "she wouldn't do this unless she truly, truly..."
Truly truly what???
I remember leaving the next morning and going home to my (my parents') house and not saying a word to either of them. I hopped straight into the shower, and showered for two hours.
In the coming days I would learn that she had another boy -- one who was away at college and was coming home to the area soon. It was understood that I should stay away while this boy was around.
It was understood to everyone but me.
I tried to call her, but her answers were terse and cold. Our mutual friends told me not to go over to her house. (Not that I was going to do so on my own, but they were all headed over there.)
I got cast in a professional play in Hartford which ran for a month. She came to none of the performances.
Shortly thereafter, my grandfather died. I was not a happy boy. I sat awake with his body during the wake. I sat awake with his body after the wake.
"Pop," I asked him, "Oh, Pop. What have I done? Have I embarrassed you? Why did you leave me -- now -- when I need you the most? Are you embarrassed of me, Pop?"
He didn't answer.
"Chris!" my mom snapped after me. "We have to go."
I buried Pop the next day. My mentor. My teacher. My liege. Gone to the ground.
I interred him to The Earth, vowing that I would be there to carry out whatever missions he needed to carry out but didn't have time to, and asking in return only that his spirit would show up every now and again to guide me when I was lost. For surely, as young as I was and about to go away from home for the first time, I would find myself lost many a time and often.
I interred him to the earth.
And when I got home, there was a message waiting for me on the answering machine.
"Chris," she said "I'm sorry for all that.... Yeah. But I think you're really... Yeah. I think 'you're really'... and I don't want our relationship to go by the wayside. So call me, you know, if you're not too..."
I called and said, "Well, hey. I got your message and I just buried my grandfather. So I'm not really in the mood to talk right now. Okay? If you want me, you know where I am. If not, I'll be gone in September."
And I was gone in September. To New York City. To college.
We never spoke for three years. Til one day, a mutual friend showed me up on her doorstep.
"Hi," I said. "I'm sorry for...."
"No." she said back. "I'm sorry for."
She took me in that entire Christmas break. We sat and watched movies. I remember a certain big bottle of cheap wine and watching Kundun... and after Kundun, she said "Finish the wine. I have someting to show you,".
While I finished the big bottle of wine, she disappeared into the shadows of her basement, and emerged carrying a bouquet of dead wilted flowers.
"Remember these?"
"Are those...?"
She nodded.
"I gave those to you years ago..."
She nodded.
"I can't believe you kept them all these years..."
"I would never let these go."
She fed me Amaretto on the rocks as she packed her things back to St. Louis.
I kept her company all through the night, as she prepared to go back to a place she didn't necessarily want to go back to, but knew for her own good she must.
Just the same as I.
As she left me on the runway the next day, she said to me "I hope one day we can do this properly,".
"Me too," I said to myself, but not out loud. Instead I let her run down that nineteen-seventies shag-carpeted fold-out wall of a runway and back out into her life.
She and I, we never did things properly. For that wasn't our way.
But that was years ago. And now, in my own way, completely different from all of that, I for once want to do things properly. With the woman I love more than any of the things I have talked about up-to-this-point-so-far.
Baby -- and you know who you are -- I love you more than any story I could ever tell about you could ever prove. For you live in my heart far, far more strongly and will stay with me for far, far longer than any of the others ever could. No matter what happens to us.
Everything I lived up until now was merely training for you. And if the fact that I wanna shout it out to the world makes me a bad person, well so be it. I wanna shout it out to the world.
But all of our stuff... well, I'll keep that to ourselves.
Yeah, I remember there were roses. But those roses are mere wilted fertilizer weeds compared to the garden that I will grow for you.
