It Had Been Years

305

It had been years since he had heard from her, perhaps decades would be a more suitable explanation for the passing of time that had occurred.  It’s not that she hadn’t crossed his mind since they last saw each other, it was merely that she was not and never had been part of his everyday world.  When he found the note from her in an undisclosed email address he kept, it was almost mistaken for spam along with all the other porno & Viagra ads.  Deleted without ever being opened, the fate suffered by most of the unsolicited email, but something in the subject line caught his eye.

She asked in the subject line are you and inserted a name that he hadn’t been openly known by for almost as long as it had been since they had last seen each other.  The email contained a series of words that only someone who was around him many years ago could have quoted back to him so exactly. “It would hurt less if I killed you slowly than if I loved you because everything I have ever loved died inside of me” her recall of his morbid, long forgotten proclamation lingered on.
 
Were his words of a dark and twisted sexuality so engrained in her that she carried them in her mind all these years as he did?  He doubted that anyone in the world could
ever remember the words he had spoken as another man so long ago.  His blood ran cold as to how she found him, not that there was any great evil involved, his mind wondered back to a time long ago as he read on.  After a few more verses of his long since abandoned poetry, she inquired if he remembered when she had asked him for a particular favor of sorts.  How could he forget?
It was the one consistent thing he thought of each and every time he remembered
her,
it was emblazoned into his memory seemingly as much as his words were to her.

How strange life could be, that after all these years on a seemingly uneventful night she had once again emerged from the shadows, almost as quickly as he had disappeared into them two decades ago.  Her life much different on the surface than it had been then but each of them at a cross roads just as before, feeling there was something more, something that might make it all a little bit bearable.
He replied to her with words that he had only ever spoken to her, at a place he hadn’t been to since or before they were there together and that only she could ever know, as to
confirm that he was indeed who he had claimed and who she suspected him to be
by finishing the part of the conversation she had not, the part that ended “…and my greatest fear is that there is nothing, there is no escape not even death.”    He thought to himself how true the words were then and even more so now.

****************************

Her last memory of him was not the last time they had seen each other, but weeks before as he stumbled out of a party.  Paul had taken to self medicating, if you will.  He was just another dreamer drowning his sorrows in whiskey and drugs.  Trying desperately to numb the pain of who he at that time perceived himself to be and the lack of future it held for him.  It would not be uncommon to find him in the company of some tawdry catholic school girl at the time,
coked
up to heaven, and drinking whiskey like someone dying of thirst would do with water.  It all seemed so perfect to everyone around him, but he was a very lost and lonely young man.  That is what drew her to him, not his personality, his status or his possessions, but what she found intrinsically alluring was his unspoken sadness.  As time passed however briefly and quickly she understood that he was not as sad, as he was dark.  He was not as lonely as she thought either, he was alone in a world to which she had only peeked into before thinking better of entering into it at any depth.

The last memory that Paul had of Donna was as he drove away in that shit
Camero
of
Mark’s.
  She was walking toward her house in the early twilight of a warm September evening in a white tank top and black leather pants, hair blowing in the breeze, and his last smoke dangling in her hand.  It was almost a classic Hollywood ending since he knew that it would be unlikely that they would ever see each other again.  It was not that any words that had been spoken would lead someone to this thought, but more of a feeling, an impending sense of reality.  He could see her lighting up his Marlboro as he took the left toward the highway, riding into the darkness of night as he headed for home.

But time and the frivolity of youth had passed.  He was in function what he had always been, but now with a middle upper class existence and a day job that some perceived as important.  He
was and would continue to be a family man.  He loved his wife and told her so often, he loved his children, and told them so often, but he always wondered what else there might be in the world.  He did not wonder these things to the exclusion of his family, but quite the opposite he wondered them to the inclusion of his family.  His wife was not as young as she once was, but Paul thought to himself neither was he.  Smiling on the inside he’d tell himself that men, like some wine, got better with age, and then laughed out loud as he thought of how wine that was kept too long turn to vinegar, he wondered when he would become vinegar.  Life was not grand, it was predictable and he had become the same way.  Predictable, in bed by ten up at 5:00 a picture of a planned life and scheduled behavior.

Donna had no intention of becoming a mother, a wife or any other such a thing.  She walked with the people who walked the halls power in DC.  She had chosen a life of power and ambition, a long cry from the awkward nights looking for someone who would love her that she had in her youth.  She was after all looking for something to make up for her distracted mother and addicted father who could always be found after his shift at the local mill at the bar with the boys and not at home with his daughters and wife.  Donna had never been a closet whore, she had been a slut from her early teens on, exchanging her modesty and virtue to meet her need to be loved and cared for with any man who might be willing to do so.  Now though she whored her mind and her thoughts pandering them for the finer things in life
,  as
for her sexuality, Virtue was something best left to be handled by French literature and conformist religious idealism. She owned her desires proudly.
Every single, sordid, wicked little one of them.
  Often Donna could be found as a casual interloper at clubs that aren’t discussed in polite company throughout the metro.

The sun sets on a new day (Paul & Donna)                         

She continued to write and he continued to respond.  She would tell him about the latest happenings in the political world, the must have drink Du Jour, hot fashions and the good beltway political gossip.  Her writing and her topics would be as sporadic and diverse as the life she lived, one minutes hopelessly obsessed with work, the next wasting time waiting to go to some party or event, rubbing elbows with people in power by day and under the cover of night spending time fulfilling some basal needs and occupying her time with a series of friends, familiar lovers, and the occasional random dalliance.  Paul would write back sharing ambiguous details of his very average existence, things in his day were far more routine, predictable to a
mind numbing fault.

For a brief time he was jealous of her life.  She clubbed and partied like time had never passed.  Neither of them smoked any longer, but both still drank.  He drank to remember, remember the possibility of what he could have been, of expectations and of a seemingly limitless future and she drank to forget.  She drank to forget who she was, not who she had become.
Who she was before all of her current pride and privilege.
  She drank to forget that she was a poor girl in a Midwestern town, that she was (despite her beauty which is a quality that she had always possessed) was not considered to be the pretty daughter.  She drank because that was the only thing that she ever loved that hadn’t used her and then simply left.  Her mother asks for money and her father’s drinking is worse, there are nights when the boys drop him off outside and he passes out before getting into the house.

  Just last winter she got a call from her sister Shelly.
Shelly was part of her past that she would rather forget, a link to what and who she was. To times that were not memorable in any uplifting way.  Donna always was in competition with Shelly.  Shelly had kids, what else
had she ever done that
made a difference other than increase the world’s population.