All Write, Already!

Sandra was the most lovely thing that ever existed. She'd just turned seventeen when we met, and my eighteenth was coming up. She was fresh in that way girls have at that age, where they look like they roll out of bed with their hair washed and combed for them by something magic in their satin pillowcase. She always had a satin pillowcase in my head, even after I saw her bedroom and it was just cotton, just some awful floral thing. Teenage girls don't buy their own sheets, and I knew that on some level, but even the tiny flowers on her sheets seemed to belong to her, and they weren't that awful because of that.

We went on our first date in the winter, and I found out that she was the indecisive sort that kisses on the first date but so very chastely that you wonder if you've been kissed at all. She liked watching her breath make clouds when she thought I wasn't looking, and when she found out I was looking, I had to get careful and just listen for the little extra puffs of air. We got to the point where she couldn't catch me smiling because I knew how long it took her to look, to check if I'd caught her.

You get the point. She was adorable, and I adored her. I spent all of my money (from mowing lawns in the summers, raking in the fall, scooping sidewalks and driveways on dark winter mornings) taking her out and showing her a good time and watching her having it, and if my record collection suffered for it, I never really missed it, or not that I noticed.

I was in love. I think your life starts the first time you're in love, and I've measured everything from her.

I was. Was.

The story of my life.

The problem with being in love is that there are always going to be other men. There's always someone cooler than you, and if I'm smiling it's because it's bitter medicine and it makes it slide down my throat a little easier. I'd been with Sandra for a year (plus or minus a few days - I used to count, but call forgetting the "spoonful of sugar") - and along comes another guy. Two inches taller, rougher around the edges, a smoker. He broke all of the rules, because my flag was flying on her clear from ten miles off, and any man with a sense of decency would respect that. Like that, she was gone.

Sandra, Beth, Rose, Kirsten, Hannah, Jamie, Delia, Gentry, Sara - my ships, sunk in very, very cold water, me still standing on the deck. I'm not a good man. I've tried it myself. I can't fly under a pirate flag, though. I can't buy her a drink when I know she belongs to someone else. Someone's got to be the good guy, after all.

Even if it is lonely.

(Erica sez: I totally cheated - but seriously, I've hardly been at the computer for two days. Here's this one... next one, coming right up.)