patrick

The work that I was hoping would pan out did not. I had only reached into the desk and he pushed me across the room.It was my first day all over again. I never worry about that any more. Or I wasn’t worrying about it then. The office isn’t totally nice, but the furniture is the only thing that didn’t sit well. The chair was old and had seen to the burn rate.And with that I sat down and starting typing. Or flipping through papers. Or both. Though the only thoughts that I remember is feeling like I had done this over and over again.Change the lightbulbs, change the faces on the the co-workers, or the color of the carpet maybe. But then, it all looked the same anyway.I remember glasses with speckles and and curly hair pulled back into a tight bun. The pencils and the pens where stuck through the tight hair follicles. It was the archetype of receptionista. Thirty-something and tired but totally in charge of the office.I was pushed and shoved into the new place that I was supposed to sit. I didn’t mean to hit my co-office-habitator in the back of the head with my files and folders.Whoops.But then a memory from my past came in the room. What was his name? I can’t remember but his face is clear. I was excited to see someone that I had known previously, but I can’t remember his name. What an odd feeling. Excitement and embarrassment. Relief and remorse for not having the memory that I had hoped for.But then it happened. She came into the room. It was the first real smile I had felt cross my face in years.She looked just like I had left her. Her hair, her height. Her eyes.We locked then like two elk in the wild. Our eyes couldn’t believe what was happening. I looked and the smile became a, “_____?”"Patrick?” reached from the back of her mind and splattered all over me. Her work dress was professional and still showed her curves. I had remembered those curves so many times. We approached like no time had passed between us.But it had. There had been an twelve year gap. Twelve years of not hearing a word or a whisper from you. And that kills. It beats me down on the very spot that we left things. The phone call that I demanded you don’t ever call me again.I was laying prone on my futon cushion sans futon. My rented bed room cast in the trees of Eugene, Oregon, has been witness to no other women. I had moved from the house that Josh and Matt built long ago.I had left to the tall trees of the Texas Hill Country and hoped that I could salvage any hope of continuing our time together.Do you remember me showing up in the middle of the night? A long drive from Eugene to Denton, Texas? It must have been four or five in the morning. I had been stuck in a spiral from school and coffee and beer. It wasn’t working the distance between us and the fights and the arguments.But I had dropped my last class. I was finished with school and hoped that you would feel the love I was driving through the 5 to the 40 to the 267 to 35. All of it to get to you.Do you remember it? The soft knock on your plate-glass window? The sleepy excited eyes that opened gently onto me as you pointed to the front door?Your roommates, who hated me, with good reason, were asleep. I miss the hate they had for me. I understood it. I acted like a jackass. That thought I was crass. I am. They thought I had a temper. I do.But you came to the front door as I parked the U-Haul the best I could. Two blocks later I was running and running through the early morning air. I was excited and the trip, the sleepy wheel, and the bad country radio stations all were worth every gas dollar I had dropped.I ran through the willow tree and felt the stings and slaps from its droopy sad branches. The branches in the early spring before I had left we sat and cried and wished that forty days could become 40,000. But they didn’t. I had left. I needed to release and remove myself from the complications that I had dragged with me to Denton.Fights, date-rapes left behind, only to find that I was alone in the northwest corner of the country. Only then did I realize that I needed to be far from all the people that I had hurt.Including you. Including your trip to Maine with … Summer? Was that her name? Could the paper that she stapled to the ceiling the be clouds that I dreamt of before I rented that apartment?Those clouds that the landlord screamed and cussed at? They are gone, too.But the weeping willow was only on the front of your current house. It struck me and I felt I had repented. I felt the flagellation’s of an early crazed hermit-cum-saint would self inflict for punishment.The drive had been an experiement in love. I was here. I was here for you then. The only part that I didn’t want to reap was the end. Because it was coming. Slowly you hugged and pulled me close to you in the cool dewy Texas morning air. The sun was far from up. You hand touched my cheek. It was still soft though the climbing gym had roughened your palm.We walked quietly through the house, no toes stubbed, no lamps knocked over. It felt like a dream. You pushed me down onto the bed. It was still warm and oh so comfortable to my aching and tired frame. Then you laid next to me and we curled so familiar. Like time had stood still. I felt you lips on my cheek, inching closer to mine.And we kissed.All of this came rushing back to me in my dream. The dream of seeing you randomly at a new job and hoping that it would start over.In you professional work outfit and smiling and nearly laughing so huge at the coincidence. We went from handshake to body hug. It was going to be alright. All the times that loss has wreaked and wrecked on my reality, here was a brief moment that it was all alright.But then the sky lit up my room, and I couldn’t help but waking up. To wake up and realize that you were not here. That I don’t have a job. That work is not something I do well. I was still smiling. I was still aching and tired like the drive from Kingman to Denton in one day. But now there is no you at the end of the drive.There is a cat, a small apartment and a motorcycle. That the is extend of what I have. Even calls home don’t bring the feeling of relief that they once did. I cry. I scream. I yell. I keep on and then there seems to be no reason. Or at least for now.But I awoke happy. Just now the dream of seeing you. The dream of realizing that I had moments like that with you should be enough. And for ten minutes of one morning it is enough.Though now I sit here to record the dreams and the real stuff and the stuff that my memories have made up. Compressed into little bits, mixed into this bit of fiction that I am trying to recall into here.I miss you _____.