I've been thinking about "the girl that got away" for many years. I wrote a love story about her called "Heat" that was published in Best Lesbian Love Stories. (I thought I was just writing another erotica story, but it turned out to be something more.) I have no idea if she ever shared my feelings. There was one night in my memory where it seems that something else could have happened, if I hadn't been so dense (and so drunk); that's what inspired the story. I don't know if my memory is even accurate or a fantasy I've created over the years. It didn't even dawn on me that I'd been in love with her until several months after I'd moved away, when I realized how intensely I missed her. (I was involved with a man at the time, we both were, and being bisexual wasn't something it occurred to me that I could act on. Seems silly now, but I was 21, and had only recently escaped my Fundie youth.)
We didn't part on the best of terms, and I think it was partly because I needed to invent a reason to break that bond with her, because I knew I was leaving town for good. She went back to the reservation she grew up on, and I moved 2,000 miles away to the big city.
But I've been unable to stop thinking of her for 20 years. Every six months or so I Google her, trying to find her. I came close a few times, but was always a few months behind her, finding the place she'd been, but no longer was.
Tonight something on t.v. reminded me of her, and I looked again...and there she was, on a reunion site. And there were other links, articles mentioning her name in local papers: an obituary for her father who recently died, her time in a recent marathon, a paper she'd written for the school on the reservation. It's like the universe finally stopped hiding her from me.
And now...well, I don't know what to do. If I contact her, 20 years of dreaming of her might crumble into an unpleasant reality that I imagined our connection so many years ago, that she thinks badly of me because of the way we parted, that she's as straight as an arrow, a homophobe, or dear goddess, a Republican. Whatever her response, I know we'd still be separated by more than the 2,500 miles that are between us. We talked about it once, how I had the "city" in my bones, and she had the quiet life, the reservation, in her blood.
I know. I'm being a coward.
Well, a couple of different things could happen. You could start up a great friendship. You could find out you aren't any longer attracted to her and put this to rest once and for all or you could not contact her and just have a nice memory.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with whatever you decide!
Mountain Sage