The Old Me

I've been thinking about the boys I used to love. Is this what getting married does? Stirs up all the sediment that has slid down the walls to fill the chambers of my heart?

Sedimentary, my dear Watson. All these ghosts. Nostalgia Dos. One for you, my true blue; two for the girl I would have been, had you been, and for the boy I was on my way to visit when the call came and they said you had only days.

Would it have been different? Lately, I wonder about those; the relationships that didn't go sour but instead slipped into yesteryear's circumstance. I miss you, old me. Meeting would-have-been him, breathless on an early spring night when he took my hand and pulled me around the corner, kissed me by a tiny row of fence posts; the back of something. And there, in the absence of dedicated space, I witnessed the last pure beginning of my life, the last time I wouldn't know that things just stop, no explanation owing. The sweetness of new love, seen through the wrong end of the telescope as first love, the sting of you going like sea water filling me up and making me drunker than the sun.

I wish I could go back to her, the if-you'd-lived me. If life were a Greek myth, I would travel to the underworld and make my offering of blood just to hear you speak. I'd peel back this decade of unfounded and needless regret like a banged up toenail, and there I'd be underneath, clean and new. Wearing lilac dresses and sitting on stone steps with a glass of wine in one hand, or at Mildred and Schubert, walking with you on the phone. Here I am again, a girl teetering on the edge of things. Telling you my stories, the air filling up with the buzz of exchanged words and turned earth. My face lit up by the promise of being young. Hey mom, I'd say, rounding a corner, I've got to go. Will you be around when I get home?