I was walking down the path to her house, using the address I'd gotten from her sister to surprise her with a birthday present back in April. Nothing big-just a CD I knew she'd like-but something to make up for all the birthdays I'd missed.
For seven years we hadn't spoken. Back then we were so young-two homeschooled kids at a state university with way too little experience in relationships to make one work. We had been so close. Practically inseparable. I made her laugh as nobody else could. She came and snuggled into my chest on long bus rides, making the most boring part of most people's lives the most thrilling of mine. In seven years, I had never forgotten the curve of her slender shoulders, or the scent of her deep chestnut hair brushing the stubble on my chin.
But when I actually worked up the courage to tell her that I loved her, she played it off. "I love you, too! We're best friends." I clarified. "No, Eileen, I mean I'm *in love* with you." She wigged out, like she was having a manic episode. Babbled incoherently about friendship and a tantalizing something about "sexual tension" that I had never forgotten, and then hung up. I tried a few times to reestablish contact with her, but she avoided me everywhere. On the rebound, I picked up one of her friends, married her, and got a divorce. Not what I'd really wanted.
Eileen and I had only reconnected on Facebook back in February. She'd been happy to hear from me, sorry to hear about my divorce. She lent a sympathetic ear and offered advice based on her own series of failed relationships. In seven years, not one of her boyfriends had lasted more than twelve months. They all bored her. I, it seemed, didn't. We could talk for hours, about anything and everything. I legitimately thought we were just rebooting an old friendship, and I was glad to have it back. There had been a time when she had been the most important person in my life. In many ways, she had never ceased to be.
I had been planning a trip to South America, in which she was especially interested. She happily invited herself along, telling me she might come and stay with me there for three months, or six, or who knows, after her graduation the next spring. The only thing was, she added significantly, she would have to dump her boyfriend before then because she was bored of him and didn't want him to come. My heart skipped a beat. Then a second. And a third. I restarted it in time to keep my grip on the phone as she told me about all the fun things we would do together at the other end of the world... how we would close cafés, and paint along the Rio de la Plata, and cruise the Antarctic shore, and rent an apartment in the heart of the Port and stay up all night in our pajamas talking philosophy. It was a date.
The more we talked, though, the more my old feelings for her returned. She had been my soulmate, and her rejection of me seven years ago, driven, it seemed to me, by her fear of her own feelings and her emotional immaturity, had crushed me. Maybe fate had given me a second chance at the relationship that was supposed to have been all along. I went to South America prepared to wait her out until the Spring when she came down. But the waiting was killing me. I had to know if there was a chance. So I wrote her a long, beautiful letter telling her that she was still the love of my life after all these years, and how I really hoped we could pick things up again where they had been left off so long ago, since it was painfully clear that neither of us had managed to find happiness without the other. I sent the letter. I waited for a response. I waited. I waited. Three weeks passed in silence. I messaged her on Facebook: "Did you get my letter?" "Yes," she replied. "Need some time to think about it. Will get back to you." Weeks went by, and she never did.
She was afraid again, clearly. She was afraid of intimacy, which is what had derailed all those other relationships of hers, and she was especially afraid of intimacy with me, because it was the real thing. I could keep waiting, or I could try to sway her to overcome her fear through showing some courage of my own and making a grand romantic gesture. I chose the latter, and I flew 6000 miles back to surprise her-to show her there was no length I would not go to for her.
So there I was, walking down the path to her house, feeling for the first time in seven years that I was walking down *my* path. That whatever happened when I got there-whether she was happy to see me or not-I was following my proper destiny at last. I reached the door. I rang the doorbell. A woman I didn't know answered, and I asked after Eileen. "Basement unit," she said, and shut the door. I wandered around the back of the quaint little house and descended the short brick staircase to the basement door. I rang the doorbell. The door opened.
It was her. And not just my memory of her, not just my old photographs of her and I and the laughs we had shared, but her. In flesh and blood. It was her mousy hair, her adorable squared nose, her cleft chin. Her eyes widened in shock, magnified still further by her red, horn-rimmed glasses. "Mac! What... what are you doing here?" She began to cry and disintegrated rapidly into hysterics as she spoke. She had told me a little about the regimen she'd been put on-anti-anxiety pills, anti-depressants, anti-everything, to say nothing of her self-medicating psychadelics, and how it had made her a little paranoid, among other things, but before me I could see the number it had done on her. This wasn't like the old Eileen at all. She would have been beaming.
"This is my HOUSE! You're in Argentina and, and... this is my HOUSE! You're in my TOWN! Why are you HERE?"
"Eileen," I began, feeling not a little pity for her, "I just wanted to talk to you. I never heard back about my letter..."
"So you came to my HOUSE?! Don't you think I would have written you back if I wanted to talk to you? I don't want to talk to you. I think you should leave."
I was dumbstruck. "I thought you were testing me... playing coy like you always do, seeing how far I'll go to keep up the dance with you..."
"I want you to leave now. Go, or I'll call the police."
My heart shattered. It was the second time she had broken it. It couldn't end like this... not again. She couldn't trample on my heart and disappear again. This was my second chance. This was *our* second chance. This was the time everything was going to go right-not... like this. Something shifted inside me, and my whole being canted hard. Somehow, I could tell I was no longer in my right mind, but whether that meant I was about to do something the real me would never do, or something the real me had wanted to do for years, I wasn't sure. My foot flew into the door jam as she moved to slam the door shut. "I don't think you really want me to go."
"I mean it, Mac." She swallowed hard, glancing down at the toe of my boot.
"No, you don't!" I yelled as my arm braced the door, surprising myself as much as her. "You're just scared. That's why you're on all those goddamned pills! Just talk to me! I've come so far..."
She reached for her cell phone as she pushed back on the door. She had always been a skinny little thing, though, only standing about 5' 4", and she was no match for the weight I could put on it. The door swung open and she fell to the ground in the entry hall, the phone flying out of her hand toward the kitchen. She turned over and scrambled for it, but I lunged in and grabbed her by the ankles before she could close the distance.
My line of sight now ran directly along the backs of her calves. Her legs had always been her best feature-nothing short of pin-up shapely-and the rock climbing that, as I gathered from Facebook, she'd taken up a couple of years ago had matured them to perfection. On my horizon rose the firm arc of her ass cheeks, writhing as she struggled for the phone that must have lain just beyond her fingers.
"Let me go!"