Love Stories
Love stories , love quotes, love songs and a collection of peoples first love story.

 

Lost loves memories

I have a vivid memory of walking on his feet.
We were in Warner Main Space at a dance rehearsal — something about birds in flight. We were all in white. He put his arms around me and I put a foot on each of his and we walked around the space like that. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he felt more than friendship.

It turned out he had for a year, while he was with his last girlfriend.

When I finally understood, it was on a night when four of us had been drinking — the gay friend and the bawdy, buxom straight woman going at it on the floor, he squeezing her breasts through her white bra and moaning, “Oh Sandra, you’re so sexy … if only you had a dick…”

Mark had me locked in his arms and legs. We were laughing hysterically … until he suddenly whispered in my ear with an intensity I found frightening: “Mirla, you and me — we’re not like them. We’re different, you and I.”

Suddenly it was January, and what I remember most clearly is the square of sunlit windowpane we could see from my bed in Talcott Hall.

He was seventeen, a gentle, tortured insomniac, and I was a twenty-one-year-old virgin who’d prepared carefully, asked all the right questions at Family Planning over Christmas vacation, brought six months worth of Ortho-Novum back to school for an event I knew would take place that Winter Term.

And it was like a movie — our bodies in slow-motion, soft-lit yet clearly-etched all at once, the pain fleeting, he skillful and gentle. I hardly bled. We laughed in the night, both giddy and crazily in love.

We sang and played together all through the winter and spring, he with his soft tenor and skillful guitarist’s fingers, I and my soprano with sometimes the grand piano on the first floor.

When I left him I cut myself through the heart with my own cruelty and guilt.

I couldn’t bear the responsibility for his happiness. I was too young … lacked living yet. He loved me unconditionally and far, far, far too much.

And I was too stupid to know how to leave without damaging this amazingly fragile soul.

We’d been separated for a year when he died in that car crash on the way home for Fall Break, a month before his twenty-first birthday.

He’d become engaged and friends said there’d been problems. He’d since planned a trip to Australia. I gather she’d broken his heart too.

I met her at the airport — Karen, wearing his blue windbreaker — and we instinctively competed in subtle ways. She said she’d been afraid to meet me. But she recalled his happiness at receiving my letter the prior summer, making peace … a gift she gave me that painful weekend. And we loved each other because of Mark, and called each other for days afterwards from loneliness and loss.

Our friend Peter told me the week after the funeral he felt sure, knowing Mark, that this was just another adventure for him. I think that was when I began to believe in multiple lives.

For years I lit a candle on his birthday and talked to him now and then, touching base, asking advice — until I felt I’d been forgiven.

Mark had already achieved a place in the story of my life, even before his death, something I know he knows.