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Twenty Years

bigwordsarecool · 2010-06-15T22:31:52Z

Twenty years ago I ran. It was my birthday: eighteen, summer. It was ninety-eight degrees and none of us had air conditioning. So we went out to the movies. About two-thirds of the way through the movie I ducked out to use the bathroom and just kept going. When I hit the highway I realized someone would call soon. Someone would be looking for me. I threw the phone out of the window. It hit the dirt somewhere by the side of the 58 and I haven’t heard from it since. I stopped at some shitty motel in the middle of the desert and slept. --- I knew this kid in high school. He had a dog named Harry. Got drunk a few times and called him up. I always ended up telling memories around the cigarette in my mouth. He always listened as long as I talked. Funny thing, he wasn’t in a whole lot of my stories. I gave him my address once. Used to get birthday cards from him every few years or so, stuffed animals every Christmas. I never told him how much I hate the god-awful things. Take up a whole lot of room and don’t serve any real purpose. But it’s what he did. Since sophomore year. I moved a few times since then. Never get anymore mail. I never left a forwarding address. Makes it harder for people to find me. --- It’s July again. Been twenty of ‘em since I left. My baby girl is twenty years old. She’s seen twenty years of daddy since mommy left her behind. Sometimes I wonder what she looks like now. Not a whole lot, but I wonder if she ever grew into those ears of hers. Wonder whether her toes ever started looking like mine, what her teeth grew out like. Sometimes I wonder what her daddy told her about me. She never looked much like me, anyway. --- Summer evenings always make me melancholy. Where I’m living now, the summers get damn hot. Reminds me of where I came from. Got hot as hell in the summers. It’s the eighteenth. Twenty years ago today is when I revved the engine in the fading light, sweat already forming a thin film on my face and neck from the walk through the parking lot. I remember the waves coming off the asphalt. --- In high school we used to skip school to buy dollar ice-cream cones and shop at thrift stores. We got to using our lunch money for secondhand belts, old cameras. Books that smelt of nutmeg. Every once in a while we’d go out for lunch at some cheap Chinese place or other, wearing used sunglasses and jackets, threadbare and torn at the elbows. We used to steal salt shakers for the hell of it. We ate lunch with History teachers at school. Told them all about the rules we’d broken, how we’d gotten kicked out of church, had walked right out of the front office, chatted with security before going off-campus without any kind of permission. We were in the business of fake hall passes and call slips. We reveled in the lies we told. I don’t really remember much else but that last year. --- He kissed me once, you know. The one I told you about before. Kissed me after school, right on the mouth. Told me he’d wanted to do that for two and a half years and just walked away. I was seven months pregnant with someone else’s baby, someone I’d been seeing for over a year. It was three months before graduation. He was my best friend. --- I woke up a few mornings ago and stared at my hands, scarred and calloused like a man’s. I used to be smart. Still am. Looking at my hands you’d never know it. Covered in marks from years of doing the kinds of jobs you try to avoid by going to school. I was going to be an English professor. Once. I put the coffee on and walked outside to check the mail. I never get anything important anymore. No more stuffed animals. All the same I get up every morning and look inside the mailbox. It’s usually empty. The sidewalk felt cool on my bare feet. There were a couple things inside the mailbox. There’s always someone trying to sell you something. At the back of the bundle was a little envelope, the kind you send letters in. I don’t know how he found me. Thinking about it now, I guess he didn’t. Inside the little envelope is a card. It’s an invitation --- Twenty years ago today. I’m a hundred miles away form the town I grew up in. A hundred miles away from the train tracks that run down Truxtun, the crumbling houses I always wanted to live in. I’m a hundred miles away from the park where I once sat and cried for ten minutes over a dead cat because I knew no one would bury it. A hundred miles away from the pocket knife I deep in the earth of my backyard, the blade that left these scars across my thighs. A hundred miles away from the closet I sat in, worrying about whether anyone would notice tomorrow, my forearms riddled with bruised impressions of my own teeth. I’m a hundred miles away and I can still feel it pressing against me. Every second of every day. --- I remember everything I left behind. And there’s a card on my table that’s inviting me to come back, a card that marks twenty years since I graduated high school. I have never gone back. I promised myself I would never go back. --- He told me he loved me. He said he wanted me to be happy, told me he knew I wasn’t going to leave for him, told me he understood. I was his first kiss. I told him everything. We never did anything about it, never told a soul. I still think about him. Every day, without fail. Every night, without fail. Neither one of us expected to make it this far, never expected to be alive this long. We never though we’d celebrate all of these thirty-seven birthdays. Thirty-eight for me, but his birthday is in November. The fourteenth. That was why he sent me birthday cards. Because we were one in the same, two people living beyond our capacity. The cards were a way of pointing out the fact that we’d each made it a few more years. Neither of us had given in to that reckless streak that haunted us every time we were alone. --- When I was a sophomore, we were assigned a Robert Frost poem in English class. I fixated on it. We were meant to interpret “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.” I was the only one who hypothesized that the poem was about suicide. --- The night I got the invitation I got drunk. I called him again. A woman answered, I don’t know who she was to him. I asked to speak to him. She told me he had passed away. I drove to the town he lived in, stopping only at roadside bars full of men with lecherous teeth. I drove to the library, a woman in a dusty pickup obviously drunk at two in the afternoon. I asked to see the newspaper catalogues. I looked up his obituaries. He hadn’t made it to thirty-eight. Walked into the woods with a shotgun and never walked back out. --- I’ve been thinking a lot about the woman who answered the phone. It had never occurred to me that he might have found someone else. I never considered that he had a wife, kids, friends who came over to watch the game on weekends. Not once. I was afraid that it meant he’d forgotten about me, afraid that I had thought about him all the time and he loved these other people, these frauds. They don’t love you like I love you. --- He sent me the invitation the day before. It took a few days for the mail people to figure out it was supposed to be sent to me. They found me with a change of address filed at the DMV. It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting them; he had stopped sending birthday cards at all. He had stopped sending me stuffed animals. I should have known the empty mailbox meant something. --- I’m not going to the reunion, but I am going back. There are things I left there that I’ll never get back. There are people who will never see me again. I left a piece of my flesh there. A daughter who will never know me. I’ve never seen her. Bet she’s beautiful. A promise is a promise. But I think when the person you promised says it’s OK you can take it back. I say it’s OK to go back. Just this once. Because I promised him something else. --- It’s early evening. I park the car. There are no more miles to travel, no more reason not to sleep. It never snows in Bakersfield.

bigwordsarecool

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Points 4705

Reviews 14

Wed Jun 23, 2010 3:13 am

bigwordsarecool says... · Wed Jun 23, 2010 3:13 am

Whitegreyson, thank you

I'd be honored if you used part of it in a poem, and you can show it to whoever you like. It's on a public forum so go for it! And thanks a bunch for the kind words

Quote

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer

Twenty Years

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