She is standing right in front of me now. I am seventeen and she is sixteen. I’m eight years away, watching, but she has no idea I already know everything about her.
First-Place Winner, Non-Fiction, in the 2013 Edition of the Phoenix, Valencia College’s Literary Magazine.
She spots me from across the sun-bleached courtyard. It’s the first day of my last year in high school. I’ve never been to this school before so I am a new face to everyone. She doesn’t know it, but I’m eight years ahead of this moment, already in the future. I see her walking towards me and I know she’s being drawn by some uncanny force, something that keeps us from coming apart for the rest of our lives. The first time I see her, I know that we will spend the rest of this year dancing around our budding friendship, not yet blossomed into love. Our phone calls get longer and later and we share mix CD’s of music. Every lyric and chord change is something we, as teenagers, don’t have the boldness yet to express ourselves. By the end of the following year our dancing will be at her senior prom, together.
Now in full view, passing through the crowded schoolyard, weaving between the shapes and colors of other students, I see her petite frame and know that our bodies won’t know each other intimately for almost another two years. From then on, our passion for one another, our love, becomes such that our names are inseparable. Soon after we graduate, we will not have friends that ever knew us apart.
Her long auburn, waist length hair swishes, seems to float, just past her hips. I know that she will donate that length twice to help kids with cancer. She has no way of knowing, but in time I will miss the short, chin length haircut that makes her resemble her young grandmother in old photos. I know she will dye her hair blonde and then red and then back to the closest she can get to her natural color, in an effort to keep my wavering attention. She never wears makeup and always look younger than she is. When I get older, I figure out it isn’t very common for a girl to not wear makeup. We are both just kids now, but she hasn’t changed much since.
Her glowing, tired optimism continues in my direction, I can see she is nervously running a million possible dialogues through her mind. She jokes now about how nervous she was then. She hasn’t heard my voice yet or made contact with my father’s deep brown, narrow eyes, or seen the smile I inherited from my mother. In her face I see all the times I will drive her to the doctor and to job interviews before she gets her first car. Her perfect little red hatchback is still seven years away. It hasn’t shown yet, but we will both wear the stress of our long distance relationship. City buses, long drives, and moving from one house to somebody’s couch, to another apartment, are all part of our enduring struggle. One day soon, our hope is we might end our elliptical chase for stability in an environment we couldn’t have imagined back then. We’re always supporting each other without living together.
The first time I see her eyes like still pools of blue glass, I know those are the eyes that light up when she sees my car pull into the driveway, and cry genuine, pleading tears of desperate reality when I leave again. The same eyes that will crush me after I break her tiny heart, just the one time, the only time.
Those tears were of a different kind. An ethereal stream of soul shattering, world ending emotion, pouring from big blue eyes, emptied her fragile heart into my passenger seat. Their salty warmth burn guilt and shame into me and our fabric that can never be undone. We make it through and take a year apart, but when we come back together, she is less confident. More disappointed than distrustful, her sapphire eyes always seem one shade lighter from then on. Like a cool breeze in September, they remind me of the change in season.
She is standing right in front of me now. I am seventeen and she is sixteen. I’m eight years away, watching, but she has no idea I already know everything about her. Her deliberate smile ignites like white phosphorous, a tightly packed snowball knocking me off my feet. She thrusts her hand forward, the hand I will then hold for many years, and keep, and wish was near when I need her most. I grab it for the first time. I haven’t yet realized she will need to have her ring re-sized twice because she is so small, even as we get older. She doesn’t know it, but we’ve already got so much in common. We have memories together that start here, right now, when we are both teenagers on the first day of my last year in high school. She hasn’t the slightest, faintest anticipation yet of moments that we will live and remember together, for the rest of our lives. We have stories together, adventures, photographs, birthday cards, keepsakes, and so many jokes, we never stop laughing. We’ve even got silly names that we use for each other. We have so many names, that we’ve forgotten what most of them mean and where they have come from by now.
Others, we remember just perfectly.
She introduces herself to me for the first time:
“Hi, my name is Grace.”
