by Jeanne Fitzpatrick

An accidental meeting brought us together. Like nothing I had experienced before, that one look from you and I was undone. The best way I can describe it is hungry, like you wanted me so bad you could have eaten me alive right there. Those sexy eyes and your smile, they way you cocked your head “just so” as if to get a better peek at me, yes, you had me before “hello”. Maybe I should have known right then. In retrospect I imagine you had practiced that look in the mirror since you were ten.

While usually my love grows slowly, this was different. A bolt of lightning, a white hot flash, intense and searing. In fact I may have skipped right over love directly into obsession. So that when you professed that you were “madly in love” with me, I knew it was true.

Now tears slide down my cheeks as I peel off the old worn boxer shorts that I wear to sleep each night, the ones you left behind. I know all of the words to your favorite song by heart, it plays in a continuous loop in my head, even in sleep. It’s the only music I’ve listened to since you’ve gone. I wonder where you are and why you left.

Your parting note said that you had to leave for a while, but you would be back. You said that you would be in touch so that we could discuss our future. You said you would call “later”. After a month, well 35 days to be exact, I am still wondering what you meant by later, later this year, later this lifetime. In the afterlife? And I find myself still praying for this mystical phone call. What on earth is wrong with me? What will it take for me to let you go? Why did you let me go? So many questions left unanswered.

I carry my cell phone as if my very existence depends on it. The phone usually tethered to my hip, but never more than an arms length away: it has become my life source. I check the ringer for the one hundredth time today, just to make sure it is loud enough to hear. I double check my text messages again, could I have missed it when I went into the shower? Not likely as the useless phone sits idly and silent on the side of my sink.

I consider the vast possibilities. Perhaps you’ve been in a tragic accident or maybe you just lost my phone number. It could be that they have no phone service wherever you are, surely that’s the answer I muse as I drive by your mother’s house looking for your car.

There is much truth in the saying that love hurts. I am slowly moving on, even though I still wonder about you. I ask myself if I would do it again, knowing it would come to this, and the answer is yes! Resoundingly YES! I think I have learned that you have to take love when it comes along. I console myself with the belief that in your own way for that brief span of time, you did love me.

Sometimes now I leave the phone in the house while I run out to work on my garden. I have even been bold enough to leave it in the car when I go into the supermarket. I consider this to be progress on my part. Yes, I still wait and wonder and hope as I sing to myself the lyrics of a favorite song, “My baby’s gone with the wind…train roll on.”