The Reflex

I hadn’t seen her since high school had ended…she was just 15 when we dated, if you could even call it that…I was a senior when I met her, and we hung out together for awhile and then it just kind of drifted away…we had never even kissed once, say beyond an awkward peck on the cheek here or there…when I would drop her off at her parents, there would always be this stilted silence of wondering, and I could never tell if I was supposed to make a move on her or that it was a deliberate attempt to drive home the simple fact that she just wasn’t that into me…she was, and still is, the quietest girl I have ever met in my whole life…she just doesn’t talk, at all!! Even when you ask her a direct question, she’ll just look at you with those sad eyes and no expression that tells you anything, and you can wait as long as you want but you probably won’t get what it is you’re looking for…even now, she is still very beautiful, a lioness with a fresh faced purity that will never fade…

She picks me up in her car, a nice one, the kind professionals drive, to go out for a bite to eat…we haven’t seen each other at all in about 7 years, totally losing touch after I graduated…I had thought of her a few times, because she was this untouched vision of my youth…she used to come and visit me at this stoner’s house where I lived after I got thrown out of home, just months before my graduation…she loved Duran Duran so much back in 1985 that she would cry real tears, sitting alone on her knees in front of the t.v. when they came on (the only real emotion I ever saw from her)…so we try to catch back up on the good old days, and I realize then she hasn’t really changed a bit…but things do change, however subtly, and I only know her as a child, not giving credit to the woman who sits before me…she really hasn’t aged one iota, and still doesn’t say too much, but when she does, reveals a keen, dry intellect…looking at her, if carefully caught, the innocence is gone, now replaced by a quiet knowing that no one can access…she doesn’t appear to be damaged, rather, events correlate simply for she is just on the normal trajectory many people are often on: childhood, graduate, college, graduate, good job, modern lifestyle, maybe a husband later…she always thought I was a bit strange anyway, so seeing me here, like this now, doesn’t dissuade or inflame that already held opinion that I am a lone ranger…I ask her about the way she used to act towards me…”did you even like me back then? I never even knew whether to kiss you?”…she confides in me indeed, she did like me, and missed me when I left our hometown…I tell her she should have told me all this then, but it doesn’t seem to matter now as we live in separate worlds…she found me because of the band’s success, somehow slipping a note or telling someone to tell me she was at a show…of course, I remembered her right away, so fixed was she as a part of my innocence, forever in my eyes an unrequited love…so this is how we re-connected…

After we eat, we have the normal conversation about where we should go, or what we should do next…it has been so long since we talked that neither of us wants the night to end just yet…she lives somewhere fairly close, but because she doesn’t know the neighborhood so well she says I should pick something for us to do…I say that I really don’t want to go out, that there isn’t anywhere that great to go anyway, especially this early in the evening…the bands space is right down the street, so it seems obvious, and I make her laugh when I tell her I am also living there…she doesn’t understand why I would want to live in a parking garage, assuming rightly so that with the kind of success I have been having that I would have a nice apartment or something…I try to explain to her the whys and wherefores of my mercurial, damaged psyche, but in some ways this enacts the old dynamic between us where I am trying to reach out to her and she only seems to get further away…

As we walk, I point out where I used to work, and betray some of the gossip of the neighborhood…I take her in and show her around, which isn’t that much to see but is an odd contrast to the successes I was just speaking of…there is nowhere to sit but the leather couch, so we both plop down and talk about life and our goals to come…all the kind of conversations you can have with someone who has known you long enough to have known you before you changed into whatever you changed yourself into, and because they are capable of drawing a line between the two points, can sense whether or not the real you is somehow involved…she was always a bit gloomier than I, so the vibe of the dingy space doesn’t really contrast against either of our personalities too much: she as the sorrowful working girl, me as the dark prince in his self-inspired dungeon…somehow, thru time and space and prior connection this all makes sense and the years melt away…

We run out of things to say and things get real quiet, but I don’t want her to leave…she doesn’t seem to be in a particular hurry to go anywhere anyway, so I take a chance and confess to her how confused I was by her when I was around her in younger years…how her silence made me insecure because there was nothing I could do to get her to connect with me, and how much I really did care for her…I tell her all of these things now with the confidence that nothing I am saying can hurt me, or would hurt her because it is all in the past…as I speak, I realize that there is a part of me that still seeks resolution, that still wants to make some sense that my feelings and emotions were real and not some teenage crush, and if she really felt me then thru her strange fog…it is one of those rare moments in life where one can go back into the past, and out of time relive what never occurred but still is inside you waiting…we are both back in that car 7 years ago, hanging on that second, wondering if I should kiss her…

I pull her close and we start to kiss passionately…it is very strange to suddenly kiss someone you have known for such a long time but have never touched, and never thought you would…the sensory memory of what it would be like if you ever did is very old, new data overwriting the teenage charge that lingers but is swiftly being destroyed each and every moment by a brand new thought…I am feeling an overwhelming mix of fluttering acceptance to this and adult style guilt…I bypass it, because I want her now, and there are no parents and schools and Duran Duran songs to get in my way…we are in this moment together, but she is as impassive sexually as she would be in the light of day…she responds more from a willingness to let me in than a need on her part to drag me to where she is…funnily, there is little to show in her eyes that a gear has shifted, or that we are entering a fiery territory that is forbidden…I undress her, touch her, feel the warmth of her body…it is as beautiful as I had wished it to be so long ago, and I feel like she remembers who I was distinctly, and this is her way of saying to me “everything is going to be alright”…that there was no need to worry then, and there is no need to worry now…we start to make love, which seems profane in this horrible bunker…her skin is a translucent white, cutely freckled as if painted on by a brush, seared by a cranky fluorescent tube above…we are awkwardly moving and reaching, trying to find each other in the middle of what feels like some old numbed madness…we tumble across the line into the space where you do not know each other…suddenly, she is some girl I barely know, and I am a stranger…I want to love her, to feel close to her, but the vulnerability and the brazen leap across space and time knocks this reality out of synch…the feeling between us intensifies, becoming less mystical and more blunt…finally, the mask cracks on her, she cries to me, and I see her revealed before me, her flesh and barren soul…I realize that more than anything this is what I always wanted from her, to see behind that mask…the sex has only been a means to that end, and I feel saddened that I have been so reckless to get there…without realizing it before, what we both wanted from each other was to be seen, and to be loved….she has made me wait for so long to find her, and maybe now this has just become our way of saying hello…or maybe goodbye… we see each other once more after this, the same dance repeated under the same light, and then she disappears…I don’t call her and she doesn’t find me, even though she knows where I am…