Valentine's Day is Over

He was 21, what seemed so much older, wiser.  I was 19 and insecure.

I was at Miami University, a transplanted sophomore.  I met Mark Little at the first party I attended.  I had not even intended to meet anyone.  I wanted to moon into my beer and bemoan the distance between me and my high school sweetheart.  Mark was a senior; I thought him a man.  He asked for my number.  I insisted that he give me his instead.  I think I really believed that I would throw it away.  As it turned out, I didn't need it.  I remembered that he was an architecture major and walking home from the library late one evening, I ducked into the hall where the architecture students were making their presentations.  I shyly asked around if Mark Little was there, half hoping he wasn't.  Yet there he was.  Beautiful.  Far too beautiful for me.  He seemed ethereal.  His blonde hair fell over his face and he pushed it back in consternation.  He looked up and caught me staring.  I stammered.  He smiled.  It was effortless.

His intensity bore through me.  Mark was direct and thorough.  I quickly became a priority.  I had never felt desired before.  Loved.  Respected.  Not desired.  Mark was fervent and impassioned.  Even his skin seemed hot to the touch.  He stood close to me when I was speaking.  He walked with my step.  He found me witty.  I found his wanting me intoxicating.  I drank him in.   I craved him.  It was a rapturous semester albeit an abstinent one as well.  I lied to myself.  I lied to my boyfriend.  And when Mark declared he loved me, I lied to him too.  I told him to find someone else.  I told him I didn't want him.  I believed that I had taken the moral path to true love, standing by old boyfriend.  Really, though, really I was terrified.  I couldn't see what Mark wanted in me.

And now almost twenty years later, I can recall with clarity conversations we had almost verbatim.  I remember the moonlight trek to a Quarry pond, the silver ripples below us as he reached for my hand.  I remember tracing the planes of his face, marveling at his perfect bone structure.  I can recall the crush of him, the urgency behind his first kiss.  Twenty years later and though I rejected HIM I bet Mark Little does not remember my name.  For all of his professed love and romantic notions, he never could have imagined the impact he had upon me.  Mark chose me and for that I am eternally grateful.  Of course, it would be years still before I even knew what to do with the knowledge he had bestowed upon me... too late for him, far too late for us.

He made me a tape which I tragically lost only but a few years ago.  The love songs were poignant and bittersweet and I imagined him laboring to choose the right ones.  He introduced me to Billy Bragg to whom I cannot listen without weeping.  I can see his long delicate fingers, nails bitten to the quick, carefully writing the songs on the tape cover.  His handwriting was beautiful, lacy yet you could run your fingertip over the words and feel how he had ground the pen into the paper as if he was forcing his soul into it.

I wrote him once.  Selfishly, I told him I had made a mistake.  Brazenly, foolishly, I told him I would take him back.  I wonder if he laughed when he read that.  Humbly, yet distantly he wrote a short missive back wishing me well with the rest of my life.

Of course, I am happy with my life.  I feel loved and fulfilled.  Still, Must I paint you a picture  evokes a longing in my depths.