Author's note: I originally wrote this July 31, 2007. It's posted as a note on facebook titled "That Old Familiar Feeling" if anyone really wants to see the original. This has been drastically revised, so do not expect the same thing if you have already read it (ahem, Makayla). I supposed I would also note here that the names could be changed.
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The day I fell in love was the same day I came to dread falling in love. Warren was a brat, and those are people best kept well away from. But it happened, and I fell hard, only to hit the ground and break. Eventually you get put back together. It was not necessarily a Humpty Dumpty case, you know what I mean? It sure wasn't a joyride on the way down from cloud nine though, let me tell you. But that story belongs in a different time, to a different man I refused to recall. He faded as the months passed into a shade that haunts those memories, which is a time I specifically do not think about.
One morning long after that, I forgot how to breathe. I was just walking on the sidewalk. But that's what happened. I was walking with my sister and I found myself unable to remember how to breathe.
The odd thing was it wasn't as nostalgic as it was supposed to be. I saw the man I was in love with at the moment and he glanced my way. I was planning on swooning right about then, at exactly the moment when his hazel eyes met mine; but B-4, boom, I was hit and my battleship was almost sunk, and there I was with no idea how to respond other than to gawk at him. Gawk at his plain, scruffy face, his Cheshire Cat grin hanging almost six full inches above me, which was only present because it was ten in the morning and not a minute before.
He was gone in less than ten seconds.
Come back, come back, I cried, but he heard nothing, because I couldn't breathe. I forgot how.
The world could have been spinning, or it could have stopped. I wouldn't know until I had realized time had stopped and the sun hadn't moved, whenever that would be. Does time move if occupied space does not?
Anyway, I ended up looking at some old drawings that day. They were just lying there, so out of pity and boredom I picked them up. They were sketches of athletes. Faceless, flat athletes from the discarded pages of ESPN magazine the year of the Riddick-Morrison rivalry.
I found myself in awe that once upon a time, I did those drawings. I found myself, even at that very moment, transported into a dream world, where nothing tangeable seemed to exist, watching, waiting, wondering exactly what kind of person would find figures, movement, and life so fascinating that they would copy it on a dirty piece of paper.
"You did that" he said. My heart screamed with insanity. I knew that place because I chose to leave it so long ago.
I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat, reeling. There they lay, those tattered pieces of paper, right there in front of me. I faced a girl who gazed back at me, and I could feel within myself the sudden eagerness to discover the real reason for the disappearance of a once radiant self. I grabbed for her, catching the cold wisps of smoke, which almost felt like hanging on to a fairy tale, the one that I had exiled from remembrance.
I clung to the lines as they bent and curved. Swing batter batter, swing, I heard myself murmur as the pencil had wasted itself like a breath of song on a swell. Smudged fingerprints interrupted subtly, almost like the undertone chatter of background noise. Easily forgettable I noted.
Then there it was, like the sun breaking through in the middle of the chaotic thunderstorm. The warm, striking, yet isolated realization that they were never lost; but perhaps rudely pushed aside in the frantic rush that life's events tend to bring. With reverence to the all the forgotten things that make up my life, yet, overflowing eagerness to greet the found splice of my former self, I held out my hand in a practiced gesture of welcome.
It was almost like coming home, Warren told me. He was with me, talking to me, haunting me with smiles and brief outburst of joyous laughter. It was undeniably quite a settling feeling as the sound wrapped around me. One that is so easily forgotten, yet...so unforgettable. And how can it be? Dripping as it is with quintessential nostalgia. I easily forgot that it was him that I had banished and as the rest fell away into disregard, he came to possess them. Yet there they were, there he was, all of it as timeless as the the tire swing in the backyard or the dining room table that I'd eaten Christmas dinner at since my mother broke the glass one of my early childhood.
Warren was as handsome as ever.
My drawings became silent next to the scrapbooks and journals that told countless stories that I smile to remember, which Warren narrated to me, simply existing all the same. And that's all it was; that's all it had to be: just an old familiar feeling.
I smiled, but withdrew my hand. I kicked away, almost dreamily, as one would relaxing in a swimming pool on a hot July day. He stayed, saying nothing. He knew I would be back. Goodbye, I sang to him.
The air was hot, but I could breathe. I felt a pang of guilt as my eyes wandered the drawings once more. He was gone and they were simple sketches once more, and I was left knowing that if I never told, Warren would remain a shade and my tall, hazel-eyed tryst would never know. I laughed like a ten year old who had a secret.
Emma loves Warren forever.
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