A letter to Charlie

Dear Charlie R,

I had a dream about you last night, which sent me down the winding road of memory and nostalgia. The dream was almost completely inconsequential, mostly me trying to flirt with you and being hindered by work and people. Strangely, you were landscaping and my husband kept showing up at awkward moments with something that needed my attention. I’m not going to read into that right now.

Dreams often mean so little once we wake up, they are scrambled and there is so much that is known without image or explanation and ultimately makes no sense to our conscious minds. Every once in a while, we get to have these vivid dreams that wake-up old memories and ideas, parts of ourselves that have long since been buried under time and life. The road this dream sent me on was lovely and I wanted to reach out to you because it’s really odd that I would dream of you with no prompting, no conscious thought of you has crossed my mind in ages. (Sorry)

So, this road, this memory lane I tripped down this morning after waking up was of the first times I remember getting to know you. Do you remember?

We were housekeeping for our high school and I think I was 14 years old? Maybe 15 years old, I have no idea. Anyway, we were polishing furniture in one of the rooms in the boy's dormitory and as we were talking, you oh-so-coolly leaned on a dresser you had just polished and your hand slipped right across as you were practicing your flirting skills and I laughed and laughed and you turned red. The sun was shining and Brenda was rolling her eyes; good-naturedly annoyed with us. I remember the precise shade of embarrassed joy in your eyes, it turned them this gorgeous shade of aquamarine, like light shining through tropical waters. It’s so simple. It was such a small moment but then and now, it made me so happy. It’s a pure and easy memory, an easy moment that meant nothing and everything.

I think that small moment started the long path of infatuation that I held onto for years and ended sometime around the New Year's I met J... circa 2011? Only then could I let it go, mostly because of your very clear body language of “It’s not going to happen...again”.

It felt final and it was ok. Which led me down another road of memory that is less pristine, at turns more fun, embarrassing, and carries a tinge of regret and shame for me. That time we hooked up in college, my sophomore year. In retrospect, I feel bad for pursuing you so hard every time you came to visit. I’m sure you were not actually interested in me as anything more than a friendly flirt, but maybe that’s just hindsight. And honestly, I am annoyed with my past self for not taking a hint and leaving you alone, or I don’t know, treating you like a human. I’m embarrassed by how shamelessly I threw myself at you and I’m not convinced you walked me home that winter night because you really wanted to. It was fun. I think. I wish I had been sober enough to enjoy the gymnastics I vaguely remember. I don’t regret that it happened. I regret strutting around after and talking to my girlfriends about it. Ugh. So un-classy.

I am sad that I let J’s feelings about it influence how I treated you later on and how that ultimately nailed the coffin shut on our friendship. You probably didn’t know this about your old school friend. It was about a year after J and I had started dating and he told me out of the blue that you had been telling stories to people about our drunken winter night together and J painted an ugly picture of what that meant. He made it seem like you were still talking about it. I believed him and I was hurt.

What I didn’t know is that you commented to J about the scratches I left on his back after New Year’s and how “wild” I was and you probably never brought it up again after that. That is not at all how J made it seem. He was speaking from his jealousy and I spoke to you from my hurt. It didn’t matter that I had also spoken about you, because that’s what 20-years-old looks like for a silly, stupid girl. I should have valued you and our friendship more faithfully. It’s one of the reasons I never visited you after your accident. That shame of having been made to believe something bad about you that wasn’t true or deserved.

We didn’t talk after I blew up at you. That has become a small ache for me, remembering the boy you were, trying to flirt, messing it up, and feeling embarrassed. I miss the girl I was who fell right into infatuation with your charming smile and sparkly blue eyes, your devil-may-care laugh that set my heart thumping. It’s a memory of you that I hold in my heart.

I miss you, old friend.

Yours,

A