It would never be revealed to me that I had given up on myself the instant I decided to believe that man: the man that said I would never be my dream, the trumpet player. In looking back, I think I was the one who agreed with him, and ran away. I left it behind, for any fool knows that a dream is what ends when the day begins. Jennifer would also go through her own version of hard times dealing with her family being obliterated, and no one person in her life could help put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, or reunite Jennifer with her little brother. The good thing is that neither one of us were fools. If the world was going to ask us to fight, we would fight. The problem at that time was that the battle was not clear, and the objectives were not defined. We were ready to fight, but did not know that we were fighting for our very souls. Here in lies the teen-angst. By this time I had graduated a year before she would, and that brought some amount of distance between us.
The
magical glue was my car(s). At first it
was a ’67 Plymouth Fury III. (Hop in my
Plymouth, it’s as big as a whale; and it’s about to set sail) It was my brothers, and I bought it from him
out right. A big monster car in high
school is the fiber of legends, and it was.
That is a story for another time.
The other car, after I sold the Fury, was a’68 VW bug. It was white, also, and fast as hell. I never thought to call it the love bug,
even though I did lose my virginity in it.
That’s funny, now that I am writing it.
As I
was in college, and working nights, my time with Jennifer was even more limited
than it had been before. I didn’t
care. Dinner before I went to work,
I’ll come get you. Problems with the
family, and you need to cry… I’ll come get you. Boyfriend going to the car show with his buddies on Saturday…
I’ll come get you. Once, she even had
the guy drop her off at my house. She
would always sneak out, and sneak back in when I dropped her off before heading
to work at the village. The security
guard knew what I was doing out there at eleven o’clock at night, at his gate
wanting to get in. He even knew that the name of the person I was visiting was
bogus. He never said a word, as far as
I can tell. Some people just know by
the look on your face what you are up to, and can smell the innocence.
Jennifer and I never fought,
maintained an absolute honesty between us, and almost never stopped
laughing. Only the need to cry ever
shattered what blue skies remained around us.
It was never questioned. In
those moments, I can still remember the faint odor of the perfume that was
mine. She never wore Design to school,
when we were out with others, or on any other occasion I can remember. I always meant to ask her if that was my
scent. I wondered if that was her subtle
way of wishing I would remain in her heart forever. She knew then that I would.
I know now that I did.
Everything on our minds, everything in our souls, everything was to be
shared, as if we were building another mind between us. The only fight we ever had was when she was
mad at me for ignoring her for a while when we had first met. After I explained that I had to make some
distance so my heart will not tighten every time I was reminded that her hand
would never be mine, she understood.
That was the moment we were going to be forever, no matter what or
who. I wish it had really happened that
way. In the end, she would be madder at
me than ever before. It would also
become resolved, but we would never really recover.
Next Page: