Orbits

There she was…unexpectedly. She was eighteen years old and ripe with youthful perfection. I was nineteen and back home living with my parents again after my first year of college. There was little to do in that three stop light town I had grown up in other than drink beer and play video games. I was pretty good at both. I was at a friend’s house that sticky summer night when she showed up with a gaggle of friends and a bottle of rum. The Super Mario Brother’s game I was on the verge of beating suddenly crashed. “Fuck!” I screamed as though my life actually depended on rescuing Mario’s princess. I couldn’t remember my password, so I decided to abandon the game.

Then my attention turned to this curly blonde tornado who had already altered the entire course of the night with her laughter just minutes after walking through the front door. I had seen her around town, but we had always flown in different friend circles. She was beautiful, and I wasn’t. She was from a wealthy family, and I wasn’t. She was popular in high school, and I wasn’t. As far as small-town caste systems go, I could have been in Antarctica and closer to meeting her than I was sitting on the food-stained couch my buddy had picked up on the side of the road that was ten feet away from her. The balmy Nebraska afternoon cooled as the gathering went on.

As social events tend to go, people congealed throughout the night into various planetoids drawn together by the gravity of what they find entertaining. One group was mad talking about hunting; there was the hacky sack group trying desperately not to let the bean-bag ball of life hit the floor, because if it did, they would actually have to talk to each other; the gossipers whispering away in the fringe about the mostly known secrets trying to be hidden in the dark corners of small-town bedrooms. For me, liquor dissolved my inherent shyness, and after a few drinks, I was the entertainer: some sort of cross between a talk show host and a standup comedian with probably more than a little Medieval king’s fool thrown in. Whoever it was I morphed into though, it worked well for a few hours, and especially well that starry night. Either by pure dumb luck or the fateful glance of perfect timing, I had snagged her attention. I have no memory of what it was I said or what I was doing, just that it made her laugh, and it kept her looking at me. I liked that. As the night went deeper into beer, vodka, rum, music, and cigarettes, the planetoids broke apart as the entropy of alcohol assumed the rule of the night. She and I circled each other until we finally had enough momentum to spin off into our own orbit. An orbit we kept spinning in for years.

I had heard she was a very talented singer, so on our swerve filled way down an empty gravel road heading back to town, I challenged her.

“So, you think you can sing all of Whitney Houston’s eight octave range?

“Ya, I think so, anyway.”

“Why don’t you try?”

I just happened to have the “Bodyguard” sound track, so I rewound my tape, and then hit play. She began to sing. Her voice nimbly climbed to the same ether heights of Whitney’s and then plummeted to musical depths only few can get to. I had never heard anything like the sound of her voice….80 miles an hour, drunk, on a moonlit country road, and time stopped in the clutches of her song. As she sang, her hands grasped at imagined figures in the air as if she were trying to touch something or someone who could only be reached by her voice…perhaps they were family, or friends...ideas…spirits from beyond…or maybe even me.

***

There she was, she had a husband and three kids. Twenty years had gone by since our orbits had broken, and we had flown off into different universes. He was a police officer who protected his family with the same fervor and passion she used to sing with. Years earlier, I moved to Colorado under the pretense of wanting to get a better job, so I could spend my free time writing between the white purple sunsets of the mountains and the yellow pink dawns of the plains. The greater truth was that I had moved in order to follow her. I knew that after all that I had done, our planets could never dance together again, but I thought maybe I could be a moon, perhaps just a meteor, even a speck of dust flying at any distance around her. Late one night and well into a bottle of rum, I searched the virtual world for her. After a few minutes, I found out she was a restaurant manager at a place not far from my one-bedroom apartment. I decided to go see her there. I had no idea what would happen.

I waited nervously in the car for what seemed like millennia before I walked in. My hands sweat, and my heart was pounding. It was as if the double doors of that happy family restaurant were my gate to either eternal executioner or final savior. I took one more deep breath and walked in. I stood in front of the host stand in a near panic, but I was able to keep my cool, at least on the surface. The pretty, 18-year-old girl who led me to my table looked like a kid to me. I realized how long ago it was since we had met…how young we were then, how naïve. This was a fool’s errand. I really must have been a King’s fool in some former life, because I had surely lived the part many times. Perhaps, this time I was being the biggest fool, but I was already in, too late to go back now. The waitress came, and I ordered my meal. It must have seemed to her that I was on crack cocaine. My attention span was only seconds long, and she kept having to ask me questions again and again. “What do you want to drink?” “Pickles or no pickles?” “What do you want on the side?” I have no idea what I ordered. I wasn’t there for food. I was there for her. But there was no her.

I finished my meal. The waitress asked me kindly if I wanted dessert. I said, “no, I’ll just take the check, please.” My hope skipped off with my anxiety into never-never land. I sighed. “So, how did you like your meal?” she asked. Her sonorous voice…the levity of it was like the morning light on a flower petal. It was her! I looked up, and she gasped. Not the reaction I was hoping for, but she was polite about the shock I had put us both in. “Well, how are you?” she inquired. Her body pulled back, but her thin, delicate hands reached forward and gently grasped the chair in front of me. It was the same motion I had watched her do when she was singing in the car years ago while plucking spirits out of the summer air. We talked nervously for a few minutes about the superficial: Where do you work? How’s it going? It sure has been hot lately, but I couldn’t break the surface, and she didn’t want me to. I paid my bill and left. Before I got out the door, she yelled out “hey!” My feet froze to the ground. “Maybe” I had the audacity to think to myself. She handed me a slice of pecan pie in a plastic container. “I know this is your favorite. On the house.” She said with a warm smile. I smiled back. Then the double doors closed.

She loved her husband, and he loved her. I do not doubt that. But somewhere within the tangle of her golden lion’s mane of hair and emerald green eyes, I sensed a disconnect… somewhere between the night’s last breath of cool air and the slim smile of dawn, she thought of a different life…a musical one: a life driven by passion and raw talent instead of society’s ‘should do’s’ and ‘have to’s.’ That was the fringe that I had always precariously lived in.

Three nights later, she suddenly had the urge to snatch her phone from the nightstand beside the bed. She had to search for something or someone. She didn’t know what or who exactly, but she needed to find it, now! Her phone froze. “Damn it!” she whispered frustratedly to herself. After fumbling through a dozen buttons to reset it, she then had to reboot it. Finally, her phone sprung back to life. During those long minutes, she felt her husband’s heavy weight settle into the bed next to her. She heard him turn out the light. She looked over at his dark silhouette peacefully resting beside her. She forgot what she wanted to search for and went into a dreamless sleep.

***

“Reset your password, please” the domestic robot politely states to me again in its metallic faux English accent. I swear I have reset it a half dozen times, but the goddamn thing doesn’t get it! Finally, the robot restarts and begins to clean the dishes. I am sitting in my living room chair with vodka shooters lying like dead soldiers all around me bereaving a war they had lost long ago. Scattered amongst the hollow, plastic bottles are dozens of photographs of us and the diamond engagement ring I had given her. I could barely afford to buy gas back then, but somehow found a way to buy that ring. She had returned it to me decades ago…sliding it across the cold surface of a rickety kitchen table that I had probably picked up on the side of the road when I was too young to know what quality was. The single, center cut diamond in the ring is small, but it has no imperfections. It turns any light that travels through it into crystalline fire. She had the same ability. The restaurant was the last time I saw her, nearly thirty years ago. Her funeral was last week. I wanted to go, but I didn’t. She didn’t need an old lover disrupting her journey to the other side. I look down at the scattering of old pictures on the floor with the diamond ring in the center of it all. It is a solar system that almost was. Perhaps, its existence or destruction relied on something as trivial as a password. I don’t know. She and I will meet again. I do know that. Orbits realign.