Clandestine Confessions

I opened my Facebook messenger in the evening – pure habit. That was usually the time her and I would have our most honest conversations.
It always felt safer to expose our darkness when the world itself had gone dim too.
It still showed her online.
And there was that brief reprieve from grief – the few seconds of amnesia – that had me begin to type her a message.
But quickly my heart reminded me “there is nobody there to respond.”
Almost 10 years later and I still catch myself grabbing my phone to text her…refusing to ever erase her contact.
Listed under “The Little Mermaid” as she loved the water, brushed her hair with a fork as a child, and had the most beautiful voice.
“Next time we are together in person I will sing for you,” she said.
A moment I’ll forever regret never getting to experience.
–
“Bing!”
A notification popped up on my profile, jolting me back into reality.
“Hi. I am sorry to hear about your friend. If you need to talk I am here.”
It was an individual from childhood.
We kept in touch sporadically up until this point. Sending a “happy (insert random holiday)” or sharing an occasional chat about the weather. Or sports. Or the latest random happenings in our lives.
We generally stayed at surface level for the prior 12 years.
Despite there being a vast ocean of emotions beneath it all.
I knew of the ways he would pine after me ever since spotting me standing in the church foyer…word spread quickly between the two families.
How we would write my name in icing on his toaster strudels.
How he would drop notes in the opening of our slightly rolled down car window.
How he would talk about me being the girl he was going to marry.
How he would doodle my name on the paint app on his computer.
How he would take photos of me discreetly at picnics and parties.
I knew.
I am sure he knew I knew.
I did invite him to prom after all…and walk by the basketball courts again and again to grab his attention…and ask my sister to ask his sister how he felt…and change his AIM sound to something different than the normal creaking door to notify me when it was him who signed on.
But it was all left unspoken.
“The Celtics won tonight” did not quite leave lines of which to read in-between either…
These clandestine confessions made it near impossible to ever see it going past a childhood crush.
Pain will tell me it should have stayed that way.
Purpose will tell me the plot twist that happened that night was a gift.
–
I was still home alone, my parents and sister not yet back from Florida, and whether it was loneliness that drove me or something more I could not yet feel, I responded.
In truth and transparency.
Taking him up on the “if you need to talk” part to perhaps the extreme.
For that one night would be the catalyst to countless words written and spoken to one another for the next couple of months – beginning at 5am when he would go to work and ending at 2am.
And at some point amidst the conversations about dreams and perfect dates and random stories about our childhood, I fell in love.
–
The relationship would play out like a fairytale.
The damsel in distress meets her knight in shining armor.
Whisks her away from the fire breathing dragon.
Opens her eyes to a whole new world she only could watch from afar while held captive in the castle.
Makes a vow to keep her safe always…
To love her forever…
–
It was secret and sacred.
It was innocent and beautiful.
It was pure and protected.
It is how I always want to remember us – even if it was our shortest lived chapter in the book of our relationship.
The more you live the more you discover not all stories are given a happily ever after, no matter how magical their beginnings.
And this would be one of the chosen few to end up with that fate.…
–
While I did not make the relationship officially known until August 28th, it was evident in my writing and posts that I was lovestruck.
I had a friend, picking up on my not so subtle clues, reach out to me.
She sent me a song… “this one seems to fit your current mood. I think you will love it.”
I immediately clicked the link.
“Aaaaaall of me loves aaaaaall of you…” It played through the speakers of the desktop computer in my dad’s office.
And that is how that tune would come to define the era.
Of loss and love.
Of the simultaneous death and birth of dreams.
Of my concurrent existence on both a peak and in a valley – experiencing the utmost best and worst emotions the human heart can feel at the same time.
Of coinciding breaking and healing.
–
And how…should I say ironic?…that the J on the dance floor at the wedding 8 years later would be standing in the same dichotomy.
The once giver of the good now the cause of the opposition.
But now the good being given by my own hands, my own heroism.
With just a little help from a new friend and a familiar song…
It all felt like a wink from C.
I could see her smirk reflected in his.
“I still got you J…”