“Don’t be afraid to be weak”

Sometimes a memory can knock me down.

Enigma – “Return to Innocence”

I haven’t heard this song in years.

The moment it started playing on my Pandora, though, I slipped like Alice into a wormhole of memories. No longer was I sitting in my office, idly inputting invoices. I was sitting in the back of a red Expedition, headphones over my ears, my personal CD player clasped in my hand, staring at him. In that moment, we weren’t talking… at least not verbally. We were speaking with our eyes - an affection impossible to convey in words. Was it love? Who knows? We were young. We had our lives ahead of us... Except he didn’t really.

I keep his picture on my wall at work. Occasionally people ask me if he is my boyfriend. I glance up at it, those familiar blue eyes cloaked in grey-scale, that hand propping up his head, that thick shock of hair through which my fingers remember sliding. That smile, lips parted, perfect teeth. I remember the way he tasted. “No,” I reply. “That’s Kip.” As if that explains everything.

We met when I was fourteen.  By twenty, our paths in life had taken  us in different directions.

He had a buffalo on his license plate. I loved the way he said certain words. I see him in the faces of strangers. I catch memories of his scent in the air. I slept with his note in my pillowcase for years.

He didn’t live to thirty.

I often wonder: If I had told him how I felt about him instead of just assuming that he knew, would he have still pulled the trigger?

We bought the CD together at a tiny hole-in-the-wall music store in Colorado. It was jumbled in a bin with other used CDs. It was three dollars. The case had a crack in it. Enigma. He pulled it out, eyes wide, corners of his mouth climbing into his cheeks. “Hey, you gotta get this one! You’ll like this one!” So I bought it, along with Rancid, Goldfinger and a fifty cent copy of Zero Mostel’s Fiddler On The Roof. The cashier looked at me strangely, but he was too busy perusing the impulse buys to notice. I was too busy watching him to care. I listened to that damned CD over and over and over when he wasn’t around.
I hated Enigma.

I never told him that.

Kip, I’m sorry your world couldn’t make you happy… but I’m grateful that you were in mine.