When I was a
teenager, I knew this girl. That's not too startling in and of itself. I knew a lot of
girls. Most of them didn't know me, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, this specific girl was the hottest, coolest, and smartest thing I had ever seen in a
mohawk in my entire life. She was gorgeous, talked
mad shite, and was a dangerous
scrapper.
I was in love.
That's putting it lightly. I mean, this chick was totally not for me, and I knew that. I was a lot more subdued, and definitely not the type of guy that I had seen her with in the hallways in school. She was out of my league. Way out. But we had a lot in common. We were both rebels, we were both smart, and we laughed at each other's jokes.
That spark, though, was never there. At least not on her end. I was totally ga-ga over this young devotchka, but she never knew. I didn't ever tell her that I wanted to take her out. I'm pretty smart like that, and always have been. I never used to get turned down for dates when I was younger. This wasn't because I was such a budding Casanova. I just sensed chemistry, and knew who would ask. I always went with the soft option, asking the girls out that I knew had already been eyeing me. In retrospect, that's my own fault. I should have been more daring. Especially with this girl. She was amazing.
What made it all okay was that we were really good friends. We did a lot of stuff together, and saw each other through quite a bit of those gratuitous growing pains that are oh-so-present in the teenage life. We spent two years hanging out, getting to know each other, and getting into trouble together. When I look back on it, I had the most fun with her that I had during my entire teenage career. I wouldn't take that back for anything - not even to have been her boyfriend.
When I was seventeen I moved to another city for a while. We could have still hung out, sure, but we didn't. You know how it is - people drift apart. We were both doing our best to grow up, and that meant doing it in different places - trying to find ourselves, whatever the cost. After the first five years or so, I was resigned to the fact that I wouldn't ever see her again.
Ten years or so passed, and she somehow stumbled back in my life. What a shock! I went to see her for the first time in ten years the other day. I was full of apprehension. I'm not too big on walks down Memory Lane, and I didn't want to sit in this girl's apartment for a few hours and be all like "Wow! I feel just like I'm fifteen again!" I hate that. Reliving the past isn't much fun - at least not that much fun for me.
When I saw her, though, it's like we hadn't gone ten years without talking to each other. It was the strangest thing.
We were still totally comfortable with each other.
We talked and joked and had a great time, as if we had just hung out yesterday. It wasn't like we were fifteen at all. We were both twenty-six. We had both lived a lifetime in adventure and pain since we'd seen each other last, but it was if that raw connection was still there. It was beautiful. We didn't really do any "catching up". We talked about what was going on now in our lives, and very little about what had happened in the ten years prior to that day. She had two children, one of them an infant, and they were both very precious. She's the most unorthodox mother I've ever seen in my life (and that's not a bad thing, either). She even taught her five year old daughter to do an impersonation from The Shining!
(with one finger up, bending up and down as she talked): "Danny's not here, Missus Torrence."
The kid had the voice perfect and everything. It was hilarious, and not something that I would have done when I was five, that's for sure. But I digress.
My friend's boyfriend, it turned out, was in jail - for being a batterer. I was mortified. Here was this head-strong girl that I had watched kick a lot of ass, with some loser that was slapping her around? It didn't make sense. It turns out that the boyfriend was someone that we both were at Community High School with, and I knew him. I didn't have any bad memories of this cat from when we were at school, and I hadn't seen him since. But hearing my friend talk about the things he had done to her, I didn't like him. Not one bit.
Okay, I know: I shouldn't be so protective, and I'm not. She makes her own choices in her life. This time, she's had enough. She's got the two small children to worry about, and another on the way. The point is that I'm just so happy that I could be able to find her again. She's going through a lot, and it seems like she needs me. I offer a great deal of moral support, as well as a lot of cheesy humor. She needs that now. Perhaps now we can even turn out to be better friends, since I am no longer smitten with her like I was when I was a schoolboy.
I guess not everything about our relationship is the same, after all.