"I missed you today."
On Monday night I went grocery shopping with Amy. During the car ride there she played a song by the Flaming Lips that sang, "Do You Realize/that everyone you know someday will die /And instead of saying all of your goodbyes/let them know/You realize that life goes fast/It's hard to make the good things last..". Needless to say, my natural aversion for songs like this, combined the weirdness of things ending with the officer, made me incredibly sad; I wanted to call everyone and let them know I loved them. That song haunted my thoughts the rest of my night and transitioned with me into the next day.
I was sitting in my Modern Political Thought class when a familiar cologne kept wafting under my nose and distracting my thoughts back to that song. By the end of the class, I was conscious of the smell's presence and the sunny sky flooding my notes with optimism. The smell was the raftguide's cologne: Mania by Armani; I'd spent an entire day picking that cologne with my college roommate and he'd gotten it while we were at his beach house in Boca Grande. When I got out of the class, I honestly missed the raftguide for the first time in over a year. Maybe it was the song, maybe it was the cologne, but when I stepped out into the spring day I realized I wanted to call my first love and see how he was. I sent him a text message that said, "I missed you today."
Thirty minutes later he called me from work. The raftguide's girlfriend has broken up with him the night before because he was impeding her emotionally; he explained that, "She started with all this psycho-babble and I was like, "I'm gonna go."" What a champion. I told him the officer and I were last week's news. "Rach, boys are nothing but trouble. You should avoid them," he said with a smile through the phone. I started laughing, getting love advice from him is like asking Elizabeth Taylor how to make my marriage last.
We sent each other pictures from recent trips: me Arizona and him Cuba. In his pictures he still had the same raftguide feet; I never payed any attention to them while we were together, but something about seeing them made me realize how much I'd loved him, because I'd loved even his big gnarled feet without realizing it until that moment.
Somehow we got on the topic of his outfit. After listening to him describe the ensemble, unsolicited, I asked, "Are you metro now? Because that's totally not hot." He protested he was not metro, just fashion-savvy. "You're totally metro!" I said gleefully, knowing he'd get all flustered in his crusade toward fashionable manliness. "You probably need more bathroom time than me now." He started laughing. After living with me he knew what that meant, in our cabin my things had taken over the bathroom until the only things he'd had for himself were his razor, toothbrush, and Tom's Cinna-mint toothpaste.
"Rach, no worries, you're still way higher maintenance than me," he retorted. I think we both smiled.
Something was different about this conversation, we were both nice. He wrote me an email after noting we hadn't spoken like this in a while, and that it made him smile. He's the only person on the planet who has the power to really get to me easily; I've fallen in and out of love with other people since him, but they still can't affect me the way he does. My heart doesn't miss him when I go to sleep at night anymore. I'm sure he doesn't consider me when he's instructing someone on how he'd like his hair cut. Once upon a time that boy and I were really, honestly, something-to-write-home-about in love with each other. Today we're reluctant friends who know each other unnaturally well. The song made me sad because it is hard to make the good things last, and sometimes loving someone still isn't enough to do that.
I was sitting in my Modern Political Thought class when a familiar cologne kept wafting under my nose and distracting my thoughts back to that song. By the end of the class, I was conscious of the smell's presence and the sunny sky flooding my notes with optimism. The smell was the raftguide's cologne: Mania by Armani; I'd spent an entire day picking that cologne with my college roommate and he'd gotten it while we were at his beach house in Boca Grande. When I got out of the class, I honestly missed the raftguide for the first time in over a year. Maybe it was the song, maybe it was the cologne, but when I stepped out into the spring day I realized I wanted to call my first love and see how he was. I sent him a text message that said, "I missed you today."
Thirty minutes later he called me from work. The raftguide's girlfriend has broken up with him the night before because he was impeding her emotionally; he explained that, "She started with all this psycho-babble and I was like, "I'm gonna go."" What a champion. I told him the officer and I were last week's news. "Rach, boys are nothing but trouble. You should avoid them," he said with a smile through the phone. I started laughing, getting love advice from him is like asking Elizabeth Taylor how to make my marriage last.
We sent each other pictures from recent trips: me Arizona and him Cuba. In his pictures he still had the same raftguide feet; I never payed any attention to them while we were together, but something about seeing them made me realize how much I'd loved him, because I'd loved even his big gnarled feet without realizing it until that moment.
Somehow we got on the topic of his outfit. After listening to him describe the ensemble, unsolicited, I asked, "Are you metro now? Because that's totally not hot." He protested he was not metro, just fashion-savvy. "You're totally metro!" I said gleefully, knowing he'd get all flustered in his crusade toward fashionable manliness. "You probably need more bathroom time than me now." He started laughing. After living with me he knew what that meant, in our cabin my things had taken over the bathroom until the only things he'd had for himself were his razor, toothbrush, and Tom's Cinna-mint toothpaste.
"Rach, no worries, you're still way higher maintenance than me," he retorted. I think we both smiled.
Something was different about this conversation, we were both nice. He wrote me an email after noting we hadn't spoken like this in a while, and that it made him smile. He's the only person on the planet who has the power to really get to me easily; I've fallen in and out of love with other people since him, but they still can't affect me the way he does. My heart doesn't miss him when I go to sleep at night anymore. I'm sure he doesn't consider me when he's instructing someone on how he'd like his hair cut. Once upon a time that boy and I were really, honestly, something-to-write-home-about in love with each other. Today we're reluctant friends who know each other unnaturally well. The song made me sad because it is hard to make the good things last, and sometimes loving someone still isn't enough to do that.