02/05/96

I saw my first girlfriend today. My first love. My father says you always love your first, no matter how long it's been. Perhaps that was his way of making up for the attacks my family made on our relationship. Perhaps they were right. It has been several years since our relationship ended. It obviously didn't kill me. She didn't date anyone for about a year, and then had two marriages and three children (one even by a husband) in only three years.

And, nonetheless, looked as beautiful as the day we met, when I was a naive and inexperienced young boy in high school. When we parted, I was still a naive and inexperienced boy in high school, but now, years later, more experienced and a little less young, she still has the same power over me.

This is a third world, a third sphere, separate from the others. I told people I was seeing her -- why in a minute -- and I told them she is still as beautiful. I didn't tell them what happened.

She was working on her divorce. She needed a ride to file the papers. That was it: a short car ride to drop some papers off at the courthouse. That grew into an afternoon. The divorce wouldn't legally finalize for a couple of months or weeks or something. I never understood all that legal stuff. We went to celebrate her liberated womanhood nonetheless.

The destination was a Chinese food restaurant. It was a place we frequented as boyfriend and girlfriend. Most of the stores around there have closed, but that one is still open. She took me there, introduced me to the place. I've never been there without her, and I was never able to so much as walk by without a pang of -- of what? Loss? Regret?

Maybe love?

Maybe regret. ("Between grief and nothing I will take grief.")

We had eggdrop soup. Just like the old days. (She introduced me to that, too. So much she introduced me to, and I held back on the one that would have kept her with me.) Maybe we flirted over the table; I don't know. That's another thing I never understood. Why not? In our eyes she was a divorcee. Again.

In any case, we ended up back at her house -- her old house from high school, where her parents live, not her new "adult" house -- and I was surprised to find it empty. She may have been, too, but she didn't say. (Would it be blasphemy to say God had set it up for us? Or a temptation of Satan?)

She took my coat. I took a Coke. She thanked me for my help. Perhaps I replied with a double entendre. I don't listen to myself in situations like that, and I don't expect anyone else to, either. She offered a kiss, "for old times sake." I kissed her the way she'd always wanted me to. (That, at least, was the story I got from the "She asked me to ask you" crowd.) I kissed her lips. I closed her eyes with my lips, and hollowed her cheeks.

She invited me up to the bedroom I'd only been able to see from the outside. ("My mother would kill me if she knew you were even upstairs." The games teenagers play.)

Afterwards, the cigarettes were on me. I had some in the glovebox. I know I'm sounding like a broken record ("Daddy," I can hear my never to be born children asking, "what's a 'record'?"), but she introduced me to that, too. Same damn brand and everything. That, my friend, is a different story, but it is so. I feel a little strange knowing she was pregnant, but even after two children and a third "in the oven" she hadn't lost a bit of her looks, face or form. And why not? Why shouldn't it have happened, exactly the way it did? She was divorced, right? I suppose I can be grateful that it was good enough not to have ruined a fantasy. Better. It spurred new ones.