do you ever forget the phone number of your first, real love? i haven't. maybe other people do. i can't. it's there. i've thought it was gone at times. it always comes back, stubbornly. it could just as easily not be his number anymore, i know mine has changed, but in my mind at least, he hasn't.
he hasn't changed.
he comes to me in dreams and is just as pure and kind and good as he was when i knew him, but i don't know him. i don't know him at all anymore.
it's futile, and i know it. but i wonder all the same, if all the twists and turns i've made, the choices and the things that have forever altered everything in the course of my life since and still coming, have really changed the fact that i loved him. could i still love him?
is this what growing up feels like? the more I actually experience the act of growing up, growing older, the more i wonder what things really stand the test of time.
fundamental things have changed in me. i can't deny any of it. i have done these things. but it helps me, i think, in some way to really know for myself that i have loved a good and pure man.
good and pure men. more than one. and others that can't be classified in that category at all.
but then again, i fall in love so easily. I dwell and pine over people that i've met once. somehow cocoon myself in possibilities that never had any chance of panning out in the first place.
it's been my experience that anything i can imagine, anything that i can see in my own mind as a viable scenario or fantasy or anything feasible, that's the thing that never happens. it's become a thing for me, the minute i start dreaming in the possibilities, i know that i have killed them once and for all. that's just not the way of my world. is anyone else like this?
i almost texted him tonight, that number that, at least now, is only digits in the universe to me. why? to make contact? to connect over a shared thing that happened when i was 18, 19 years old? i don't know. to put it into perspective that way, to realize I was only a teenager when i find myself surrounded by teenagers, doesn't do anything to give that time in my life any sort of legitimacy.
maybe i'm even a regret. a black mark on an otherwise great record of judging for character. maybe I am the mistake. maybe to the right (wrong) person, we are all capable of becoming mistakes.
it's not comforting to universalize. not in this case. i want to be special, i think we all do. to be that person that you consider seven years later, remembering what it felt like when you slept together in that same position every night that wasn't like the position that you've slept with anyone else in every night.
to have been there when things happened, things that mattered at the time. to be the person that got the whole story, as much as anyone would have been able to tell it.
to be the person that you actually live out that dream of watching the sunset with, listening to frank sinatra croon as you leave the park after a long walk. but that's not a memory of the phone number love, that's someone else. maybe i'm jumbled in with both of their memories of women they have loved. women they have hated.
what's more important? to be remembered fondly, or to simply be remembered at all?
i don't know. i don't know.
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