Valentines

"What are you doing Friday?"
"No plans"
"Would you like to go out with me?"
"Uh, yeah, sure...That'd be nice"
I wasn't expecting it. I may have been hoping for it, but I wasn't expecting it. She had most recently dated a freind, a taboo. She was beautiful, there was and hadn't been anything really between them. I couldn't say no. She had asked me out, how could I say no.

I first saw her in that house in the country. It wasn't hers, yet she flowed through it familiarly. She came and went like a phantom roommate. The house was not mine. It was in the country. Shaded by oaks and maples. A rolling acre dotted with trees. There were a handful of people living in that house. She had a handful of rings, brilliant red hair pulled back, layers of clothes guarding against the winter and pale green eyes.

We left for the coast. It was a Friday. It was Valentines day. We concluded that it was mere coincidence. I made dinner in the house by the sea. A giant open main room with windows staring out, it was my solitude. I had brought her into it. Over the course of the night we talked. We slept. The next morning it was unspoken, yet concluded, that we would be inseperable. I was young, we were young. The excitement, the belief in passion and undeniability ruled us. The fourteenth would become milestone for us, that day we came together and formed our cocoon. It was the sort of relationship that demanded all hours of all the days. The kind of relationship that friends would normally question the health of. Yet no one did. It seemed so right. I graduated. I moved. Things slipped away. The sun on a winter day burns brightly but the days are so short.

We met again, eight years later. We were fueled by the memories of the beginning, not the end. She showed up at the restaurant on the night of Valentines day. So we began the trek again. Like a snowball in the freezer it had staled. You can't recreate a snowday, you can't recreate youth. We tried to continue on, as we had long before. It was precious, it was desperate. We let it slip away. I no longer walked with Young Werther in my head, I was too tired. The world had showed me too much. I was just becoming myself...again. I could not be someone elses world and sacrifice mine. The breadth between too many expectations and too few cannot be spanned.