Lost Love is Forever

I am in complete and utter shock, because I haven't seen Kathy Ford in over twenty years. Let me think back for a moment. When was the last time I saw her? . . .

Holy shit. It was during summer vacation after I---after we---had graduated from our senior year in high school. It was at the fair, actually. Right in our hometown, too. I remember it vividly because the lights from the Ferris Wheel and nearby booths have stuck in my head for so long, neon lights that never fade, just as the radiance of Kathy's aura still hasn't faded from my memory. That beautiful girl was my Kathy Ford.

A queen-bee sting of pain poisoned my heart, though, because I knew that I was not hers in return. In addition to her being my Kathy Ford, she was also every other boy in school's Kathy Ford. It wasn't that she was 'out there'. She wasn't a hooker. She didn't flaunt herself around. . . too much. She was a regular girl with a regular life. Or so I had thought.

That particular night, the night of the fair, she had been wearing an open green-knitted sweater, jade-colored. Her mom had made that for her. I know this because she told all of her girlfriends: Nicole, Nina, Mary, and Delilah. Looking even further back, nearly two years by my estimation, I can even remember her boasts of what a wonderful, hard-working mother she had. Oh God, what a beautiful shade of cherry red her cheeks glowed. And how, too, the other girls had flocked around her like sheep to a shepherd when she spoke. But I couldn't flock to her.

Even when I sat in school with her, I had to gaze from afar. I used to sit in my wooden desk and view her in the halls, by the green lockers that complimented her sweater and chestnut hair. I remember a specific time, when I was in detention, again, but this time for punching Tommy Pickler in the nose. It wasn't broken. It wasn't bleeding. It was hardly even red, but I had punched him nonetheless, and I guess that was against school rules, even when the kid had been stealing your lunch all year, and especially when he cried and cried and cried about it like the big baby he was.

All the teachers were proud of me, actually, for finally standing up to him, but they didn't say anything about it and neither did I at the time. Even if I had wanted to talk to those teachers about our common pride in what I had done, I couldn't. One reason was the reason I have already stated, detention, and another was because I was too obsessed with the bright soap-opera glow of a certain special girl.

I remember my thoughts, exaclty as they were. . .

Kathy Ford. I sighed. What a lovable, popular, amazing, social, beautiful, charming young girl. The kind of girl that my parents would love me to love. Another sigh. Kathy Ford, Kathy Ford, Kathy Ford! I wanted to scream her name just as the blood in my veins were screaming her name, now. How I loved her. How I loved everything about her: those perfect lips, like a freshly cut fig, that pale neck, round breasts. Even her name rang in my brain, a lyrical limerick all to itself. Kah. Thea. For-eh-d. My breath seemed fresh, saying it.

Before I knew it, the bell was ringing and detention was over. It startled me, that bell, jolting me out of a roller-coaster daydream right as I was about to enter the mysterious and obligatory tunnel. Perhaps it was the jolt that the bell gave me that finally prompted me to speak to her. I decided to speak bluntly to her about what was on my mind: her. Besides, everyone of the popular boys in school used to tell me that girls liked to hear about themselves. So I walked right up to her and said hello.

Anyway, that particular day was amazing for me. I felt so much energy and exhilaration in such short breaths; I felt as if I were having epileptic seizurs. But Kathy stood there and listened to me. She heard every word I said and didn't mind replying with some of her own amazing, graceful remarks. I felt so uncomfortable, yet so comfortable at the same time, that only two words I can think fit together perfectly to describe those treasured moments: "Absolutely," (as in the purest form of) and "incredible" (as in the state of apparent impossibilty in which one cannot bring himself to trust what is clearly reality).

So. How do I say this? I guess the shortest way would be that we agreed to a date. At least I considered it a date. It was only later that I found out she merely wanted to be friends with me.

Well, that was the first step. It was a good step, too (more like a leap, really) towards breaking my heart. Crack. That's exactly what happened. A tiny hair-line fracture ruptured the vital vase called my heart. Then the fracture split vertically, almost bubbling up to my face, where it surfaced and cracked once more into a lip-creased smile. Sitting there in the diner, having just been hit by a semi-truck, I was expected to turn my shattered head back around and smile. So I did.

A handful of rendevous (my hidden motivations being oblivious to her charming exterior,) she started to confide in me, telling me her deepest, darkest secrets. This was because no one else truly wanted to know, she said. She told me about the other boys. She told me that they only told her what she wanted to hear. They said how much they loved her, and how they wanted to know everything about her; They said they wanted to be with her forever, and then they'd take her hand, so romantically, kissing it at times. But it never stopped there. That hand always migrated down someone's jeans, and somehow, it always ended up with her in a sweaty mass of semen, saliva, and salty tears. I was the only boy that showed that I really cared, she had said. That, at least, had made me feel good.

Later, she would tell me that her mother didn't really weave her famous sweater after all, she had gotten it at the Salvation Army. She had so many secrets she wanted to tell me back then. She occasionally snorted cocaine with some of her out-of-town friends, she said. Was it obvious from looking at her? She aksed. I always said no, because it wasn't.

She told me, too, that she only went to church on Sundays because one time she refused and her father had beaten her so badly that she thought her brains would come out of her nose. Did I remember three years ago when she was sick for a week? Of course, I said. That was when she had to have time to recover from the scars, both mental and physical.

There was more, too, more cracks in my eggshell-heart. She reluctantly admitted, not being able to hide anything from me, that she had seen twelve penises in her life. Twelve! Crack, said my heart. Another hair-line fracture was growing there. After the talk we had, after all the emotional toture I had endured for her sake, I felt as if there was nothing left that could be mended. I beleive the limerick goes: ". . .And all the King's horses and all the King's men could't put Humpty-Dumpty back together again." I envy Humpty-Dumpty.

It's almost amusing to observe, in hindsight. This crack in my heart grew bigger and bigger each time I'm with her, but the wider the split the more I foundnd myself falling in love with her. There was a little flame in my heart that burns for her, and it's like every time I'm with her, that flame is burning hotter than ever, trying desperately to fuse my emotional fissures back together.

The most agonizing experience she inflicted upon me was just before the fair that year. Despite my warnings, beggings, pleadings, she continued her lifestyle, and didn't seem to care about me at all. . . except as a shoulder to cry on. I began to get tired of the same old routine, of meeting up at the same Denny's each early morning after her father had beaten her, to discuss how hurt she was inside. I knew that that was selfish thinking on my behalf, but it was how I felt.

If she was hurting so much inside, I thought, then why was it that she never took my well-worn advice? And why was it that I always found myself lending her money that I knew went straight to her coke habit?

Sympathy started to fade after a while. We remained best friends, mostly because she was the only one that wanted to be with me. But she had so much more going for her than I did.

At least she was an outgoing person that could befriend anyone in a second. At least her father still loved her, even though he beat her. At least she had someone she could go to when things got rough with her parents.

My father committed suicide on my twelfth birthday, a fact she didn't know. My mother was an alchoholic who could barely afford the trailer-park rent, having to sell herself on the streets in order to get that money. I bet Kathy didn't even know what it was like to have strange men in her life, making Grizzly Bear noises four feet from your head in the middle of the night. (That is, when I wasn't dining at Denny's, listening to her problems all the time.) Once again, at the end of her excursion of self-pity, I'd put my arms around her, realizing that in all actuality, she knew nothing about me at all, knew nothing about any of what my personal life was like.

This leads me to a conclusion, or theory, really, about the extent to which people know each other, and how that is determined. If one person knows an immense amount of information about the other, then they know a lot about them. You cannot truly know someone unless they know about you in return. It all comes down to how they react in the end. If you could tell the same amount of information to anyone, the one who reacts the most compassionately is generally your most valued friend (or a professional impostor).

At the time of the fair, Kathy and myself were probably visiting Denny's twice a week, where she would ritualistically vent to me. We were slowly growing apart, and even though I barely recognized it, Kathy didn't recognize it at all. It's sad, I think, just as it always is when friends drift apart. We were like a piece of taffy, conjoined by our bond, but stretching out until, inevitably, that taffy would tear, the sweet, opaque tendrils curling upwards in agony at the seperation of two riven souls.

However, by the time the fair rolled around, we were still one, although I felt myself slipping farther and farther away from her, and noticed that her flirtatious behavior was dramatically increasing. I wept on the inside a thousand tears for every finger-twirl in her luscious hair, or every gleam in her eyes that glanced in a direction other than my own. I may have lost sympathy, but I didn't lose my love, my wrenching languish to grip her arms, to hold her. No, it was impossible for me to lose my love. . . Impossible. That was the deception I had planted in the soil of my mind, and I thought its roots were immovable. I just didn't realize that the roots were so stiffened that they had dried out, becoming delicate. I thought, she's my love and I'm losing her to a hundred other boys who are better then me. I was just a pansy little friend of hers. In her eyes, I emaciated to the skeleton of a ghost in the presence of others. God, but I still loved her.

So there I was, at the fair and my Ferris Wheel ride had just ended. I was waiting for her, but she never came. . . At least not to me. So I decided to wanderaround the grounds aimlessly, searching. Then, I finally found her.

It couldn't have been more obvious if the tent was shaking. There, behind the booth-tent for one of those silly "shoot-the-duck, win-a-prize" games, was the love of my life (yes, to this day, my life,) and Daniel Morano. Fucking.

She was screaming his name, digging her fingernails into his back, and now, thinking back on it, it was probably for the blow. It looked like love to me, though. Or at least she though, in her twisted Kathy Ford sort of way, that she loved him. Well, fuck her. She didn't even see me, her eyes were closed in orgasmic ecstasy as his pulsing dick moved in and out as fast as a laser-show's blinking lights. He didn't love her. He just wanted to cum. There, (the image is burned in my brain,) was the girl I love. Eyes closed, she didn't even see me, but I saw her.

And that was the last of our contact. I ran away from home that very night. I didn't need to tell anyone, no one went looking for me, because my mother didn't care, and I didn't have any friends to wonder where I had gone. God knows why the teachers didn't say anything, but they didn't.

I became a bum for a year and half, hitchhiking my way across country, trying to find myself, until I finally fell in love with a beautiful young girl named Delia. Her father gave me a job, and actually he was the one who introduced me to her, because he picked up hitchhiker's like myself. They were a rich family, (apparently her father, whom I came to refer to as Joe, owned a trucking company,) and Delia was an only child. I guess I'm really blessed to have her father's approval even though my appearance was an awful sight to behold at the time. On top of all of that, I was blessed with Delia's love. What a wonderful woman I had the privelage and blessing to have met.

Needless to say, Delia is now my wife, and we have been married for eight years. We have three children, all boys, Gideon, Charles, and Samuel. I have led, since meeting Delia, a happy life thus far. That is, until now. Right now, I am staring into the ragged, gray old face of Kathy Ford, or what's left of her.

"Kathy?" I say, in disbelief, although it cannot be mistaken that the woman standing before me is she. Through the disfigured appearance, she is still recognizable; something beautiful once lied beneath the grime.

"Yes. It's me."

"What are you doing here?"

"Who is it honey?" my wife is yelling to me over the sound of three-month old Samuel screaming about how he hates peas.

"No one! Just a second!"

"I need money. . ." she says to me, reaching out a haggard old hand to clutch my neatly ironed shirt.

"No, Kathy. No. I'm going to shut this door now, and I don't ever want to see you again. Ever."

"But---"

"Goodbye." I shut the door in her face, and a tear rolls down my stern, stone-golem cheeks to drip over my lips and remind me that I still love her, and that's exactly why I did what I just did. I am not who I used to be. I'm not. I cut myself again and again to remind myself of her, and I'm a happily married man. I must go now. I must help my wife and not look back.