SimplyMom: Between Us Girls

Posted by Mary

Some days make you feel older than others. This, I fear, is one of those days. It’s right up there with the day I found my first gray hair and the day my youngest entered preschool.

Today, my high school sweetheart turns fifty.

(First, a disclaimer – we aren’t the same age. We weren’t even born in the same year. Still, it was never an inappropriate relationship, which means I am right around the corner from the ultimate “f” word.)

Part of me is a bit ashamed that I even know the date. After all, I haven’t been in high school for decades, and I haven’t spoken with this particular person since we were in college. We’ve had entire adulthoods that didn’t include each other, and for the most part he is a mere pleasant memory for me. But today, I flipped my little desk calendar, saw the date – “July 28” – and remembered.

What I remembered most, oddly enough, was another birthday, another July. We had already been dating for quite a while – we were inseparable, we had plans – but on this birthday, my beau received his driver’s license. His father had pulled some strings and enabled him to get it on that very day, because the two of them had plans to tool around Canada on motorcycles for a couple of weeks.

So he pulled up, flashed a grin and that precious license, and then was gone, off on a Yamaha to bond with his dad and to celebrate not only a birthday, but his last really free summer. Next summer would bring college tours and applications and real worries about the future, but that summer the shadows of adulthood were still far off. We kissed goodbye, contemplating real car dates upon his return.

I spent that summer rehearsing – I was in the community theatre production of “Godspell.” When I wasn’t on stage, I was tanning with my girlfriends, or riding my bicycle across town (see, I was still too young to drive) or studying “Seventeen” magazines to select my wardrobe for September. But in my head, I was writing a letter, “Please, hurry back.” And in my heart, I was making wishes. I collected his postcards and wished we’d never have to be apart again.

And seven months later, I dumped him. Not because of anything he’d done – he was, actually, the best type of first boyfriend a girl could have. But college was pressing down, and forever kept getting closer, and I felt I wanted to know more about the world before settling in with the boy with the grin and the motorcycle.

We stayed in touch for a couple of years – we were so close at one time, it seemed impossible not to. But then our relationship became ghost-like, haunting anything new and chasing away the hope of something different. I don’t know if it was me, or if it was him, but we stopped writing each other. I often thought about getting in touch, but I know the person I loved – the person I’ll always love – doesn’t exist any more. He’s gone just as the girl who loved him is gone, lost to time and children and to loving a different man in a different, grown-up way. The way we could never have been then, when we were young and love was just a bud on a tree that is now leafy and full.

Today, someone I loved is turning fifty. He may look back now, and perhaps he’ll even think of the girl I used to be. If he does, I hope he smiles.

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SimplyMom: Between Us Girls

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