random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Paving Paradise

There's something to be said for low-grade Internet stalking. I'm talking about the simple act of Googling some long-lost name from your past, landing a result or two, and using what you might find to maybe speculate a little bit into their lives since you've been missing them.

You might be surprised to know that although I tend to dwell a little bit on the situation with the ex-wife, hers is not the face I see when I want to remember what love feels like. I loved her, I was in love with her, but she didn't love me more than I did her.

No, that wasn't in the ex's heart. Despite her early-separation claims to the contrary, she wasn't in love with me. Probably never was.

I knew what that felt like - to have someone madly in love with me. It was never the ex.

It was a girl who, for six months almost ten years ago, was able to show me what being adored was all about.

I can close my eyes and see her sitting on my bed, barely wrapped in the untucked sheet, as warm and rumpled and breathless and satisfied as I was. And I still can feel what it was like to see her bite the corner of her lower lip and drop her eyelids just oh so slowly in that way that could only mean "come back to me here, come back to me now."

And I would. Eagerly.

And words never got in the way, because they weren't necessary. Not at first. Chemistry took care of that. Chemistry was the equalizer, my blinders to the situation.

She wasn't smart enough, focused enough, driven enough, old enough for me at that age. I wanted more from a woman, and she just wanted everything I could possibly give her, and wasn't taking the subtle attempts to distance myself appropriately.

And so I took her to dinner, three blocks from my house, and I was breaking up with her - I did break up with her. But then she grabbed my thigh under the table and blinked slowly with a growing smile, and I wasn't breaking up with her right then anymore.

To date, this was the only time I've left a restaurant without seeing my bill. I left far too much money on the table, and we could barely contain ourselves on the sidewalks. Two steps inside the door was all it took before she was pressed up against the stairs and attempting to wiggle both of us out of our clothes.

It was the last time with Angelique.

I've Google-stalked her for a few years now. One picture in one newsletter was all I could ever find. She wasn't a small girl when I knew her, but had her curves in all the right spots. She's bigger now. Less attractive. But maybe once every other month I'd Google her and pull up the newsletter and just think for a couple minutes what might happen if I were to track her down today. I'm pretty sure I know where I can find her.

The newsletter is gone. I tried to find her today, scoured through the archives of the website from her organization, but it's gone. And that saddens me a little.

I don't think I miss Angelique. There were solid reasons I didn't stay with her, despite sharing a ridiculous amount of chemistry with the girl.

I think I miss the thought that I could pull up a picture of a slightly overweight Hispanic girl from ten years gone that was the last woman in my life who really loved me. Someone for whom the act of saying those three little words to me was raw and pure, yet loaded all at the same time. She wanted to put her feelings out on the ledge, walk across that tightrope, and it was, very simply, because she loved me.

I don't miss Angelique, but I can't deny that I think about her. And I wonder if the complexities of marriage, partnership, friendship, and love are so vast that they eclipse the simple notion of unadulterated desirous love at my age. Does a girl of eighteen with no roadmap, no retirement account, no kids, no dog, no mortgage have a next step planned past "I love you" when she falls and falls hard? Probably not, but does a woman of thirty?

I want love to be simple and optimistic. I don't want to audition for fatherhood or provider status. Not yet. I want to know that when whoever the next she will be crawls up under my shoulder and rests her head on my chest that it isn't two kids and a picket fence that's in her head. I don't really want anything in her head beyond feeling that she belongs in my arms.

Love, on my ex-wife's terms, was loaded. I want to have the feeling again that when my girl twists the corner of her mouth into a smile and casts her eyes demurely to the floor that it's me that she wants. Just me. Not my kids, not my 401k, not a lifestyle or anything like that. Just me.

That's what I miss about Angelique.

[>>]posted at 5:39 PM by BG - click to email
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