the old-school guestbook archives
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venus retrograde, part 2 ~ June 20, 2004 - 9:17 p.m. this is part 2. part 1 is here. so all month, risa has been talking about venus being in retrograde, and how for aquarians that means we'll be reviewing the whole of our love lives. but i had to laugh, when chris called. ray had told me that chris was coming to town for his brother's wedding. i'd love to see him, i said, but i'm sure the feeling's not mutual. i came to find out later that chris was thinking much the same thing. so i came home from a flight, and there was a message from chris on my machine. much too tired i was, that night, to even think of calling my ex i hadn't talked to in eight years. i called him the next day, and we made plans. i'd come get him at his brother's apartment, only about 10 blocks from mine, and we'd go to kopp's for frozed custard. seeing him again was astonishing. so totally chris. he climbed into the car and we hugged each other and laughed, and i said you got a lot more tattoos, and he said your hair's back. last time he saw me, it was shaved and i was on my way to boston to march in the pride parade with my soon-to-be-girlfriend. now it's as long as it was when we broke up. we drove to kopps, and talked and talked and talked. catching each other up on the last ten years of our lives. how i've gotten closer to my parents, and he's gotten further away from his. odd jobs we've had, odder relationships, funny parallel synchronicities. we both dated gun nuts. we both found buddhism. and what was funny is how easy it felt, how good. how we just fell into being the kind of friends we were in the beginning, only now with such deep knowledge of where the other is coming from. we thouroughly enjoyed each other's company in a way i'm sure neither of us expected. all the craziness is so far in the past, we can take each other as we are, here and now. and at some point he turned to me and told me how much of his emotional stuff he's worked out over the years, how much he's come to understand about the way his parents affected him, how his relationship to art has changed so that he's not so single-mindedly obsessed anymore, and he said kelly, i'm really sorry! and i laughed, and wholeheartedly i said me too! and we laughed some more. we left kopps and headed to the lake, where we spent a good amount of time back in the day, running around. we got coffee and tea at a place that didn't exist ten years ago and sat by the shore and talked some more, and laughed at the geese and their babies, and he skipped rocks and we talked some more. we both miss the ocean. he's thinking about moving to san francisco. we both dream about california. we got up to go when the mosquitoes got thick, but on the way back to the car i saw the wharf, another place where milwaukee kids go to play, and neither of us had been out there for years. we walked to the end of the wharf, talking, and then climbed the rocks to the end of the breakwater, and sat there watching the lighthouse beacon flash and the ducks cruising by. and we talked, and we laughed a lot, and it was just so easy and so good. at some point we wrapped our arms around each other, and at some point later still we began to kiss. and even a decade past our breakup, it felt so natural, because after all, this was chris. and we climbed back over the rocks and onto the wharf, and walked back to my car holding hands, our fingers entwined, just like the old days. holding hands like it feels like i haven't in years. we went back to his brother's apartment, his brother and sister-in-law off on their honeymoon, and we climbed into bed and showed eachother some tricks we'd picked up in the last ten years, tracing the lines of old scars and new tattoos. his skin smells the same, and i remember how i used to wrap myself in the blankets, breathing in his smell after he left for work. how, that first summer, i used to ride my bike home from his house smiling deliriously because i'd never known i could be so happy. we slept twined around each other, restless and rolling over, planting sleepy kisses but never losing contact, skin to skin, and it was just so easy, and warm and good. and he teased me about my sleepyheaded ways in the morning, and i yawned and smiled and chose not to remind him that chronic fatigue is a side effect of my poor health, that my body is feeling the effects of hard use and tropical living, unlike my late-sleeping ways at age 19. and we got up, and went out to breakfast at the old school diner where we always used to go, which hasn't changed a bit in the last fifteen years. we agreed to write, and i thought about how long it's been since i've written actual letters, like with stamps and all, and it sounded like fun. and i took him to edwardo's to meet up with ray, who was going to take him to the airport for his flight back to philly. and we were quiet, and i was sleepy, and we spoke in little pieces of thoughts here and there, and i said you know, it never was for lack of love, and he did what he does, he said huh? giving his dyslexic brain a second to catch up, and then he grinned. no, it wasn't, he said. it was all the other stuff around it. and we laughed, and we hugged and kissed goodbye, and he told me it was wonderful to see me again. and it was, it really was. wonderful. who'd a thought. venus retrograde. dig it.
(((rings))) |