Hello Again

“Hello again.” she said when she looked into my eyes. A smile fell upon my lips when I replied “It’s been so long.” A tear dropped from her eye, from joy or from the sorrow of never knowing the person that I was and who I am now. She touched my cheek with her fingertips, they felt like feathers tickling the rough onset of fur that covered my skin. I breathed in. It must have been the excitement of her touch when she quickly withdrew her hand away from my face, and just as fast, she looked away. I don’t know if she was embarrassed or if she felt all to real. I hadn’t seen her in over seven years, and even then, she was a stranger to me. She remembers so much about me, how could I have forgotten her so well? She was a ghost of my past, reincarnated into my present, and what was to be my future.
She graduated high school in 1994. Soon after, she moved into a quaint apartment complex with her parents located right behind my employment. I was a cocky young boy with the anti-social skills I aced since I can remember. She was a young, nerdy girl who had yet to blossom and find her niche in life, naïve and inexperienced. She was a regular there and always watched me, not like a stalker by any means, but gently, from a distance. She had just begun a life trial with cosmetology. She always seemed shy and reserved, always looking at me like she knew me, which was entirely unlikely for me to let anyone know me. I was so enthralled with my own life that I never knew she had the slightest crush on me. Innocent at best.
Eventually I quit my job, and moved on with life, leaving her behind, and never seeing her again. She moved shortly after as well, and two years later, she began working at a telemarketing company. Her duties there were boring, doing the same spiel day after day. It was an endless place of blasé watching people come and go. I had a family at this point. I was married and had an infant to support. I needed more than what I had and I, too, began working there. She always looked around, being a people watcher, studying every human that encountered her. One shift she scanned the room and her eyes stopped on me. She knew me, my face at least. I had a completely different aura about me than I had in the previous two years. I transformed from a punk-ish, cocky, metal-head into what seemed almost yuppie. Her eyes were targeted. She had asked our coworkers to confirm my identity, in which they reported she was correct. For two years she remembered my face and my name, and that was all I was to her. That’s all I would be, considering that I was married with a child. Eventually she requested that we have breaks together, being her attempt to finally get to know me. We sat outside, smoking cigarettes, chit-chatting about all the up’s and down’s any marriage could have. I never gave her too much detail, because I was a private individual. I barely remembered her from my past. I was a faithful Husband, so to even speak to another girl was beyond me.
As time went on we discovered that we both resided in the same housing community, and as fate would have it, right across from each other. We sporadically had conversations when the both of us were on our patios. Upon one conversation at work, I ended up giving her a business card of mine from a business I owned. She kept the card in her agenda binder. Soon after, she moved to a different state.
In 1999, she came back home, and went back to work at the same company. I, on the other hand, decided it was time to take care of my family, and I joined the military. She remembered me still, and I had nothing. She remembered my name, what I looked like, and what I did. Did I really make such an impact on her that she would never forget me? I was nobody. She didn’t know who I was- just what I spoke with her about. All she knew were my marital misfortunes. She never saw or heard from me. Once again, I left her behind.
She was a girl who spent many years playing on the Internet, and chat rooms, meeting people, partying ever so often. She turned out to be savvy. Seven years later, I am divorced, and retired from the military. She plays on a program that allows one to locate people for free if they belonged to the same program. One evening, I was sitting at my desk, forming some sort of mild entertainment on my computer. As I check my emails, there is a new one from someone I do not know. I reply with a questionnaire asking sorts of things as to prove how you know me. As I read the response, I sat in awe. Here I was reading the last nine years of my life as I knew it. Who was this person telling me my life story? I couldn’t bear to read response after response, so I blurted my phone number to her, only to end up calling her myself. We got into this discussion about how she knew me, and soon after, I told her about something that happened to me in California not so long ago. I had a good friend who was into palmistry, and she read my hand telling me- mind you, this reading happened at least 6 months prior to this email- someone would get in touch with me out of the blue from my past. She stated I would not remember this person, but that he/she knew me, and eventually I would remember him/her. Here she was out of the blue, and from up above. At this point, I think we spent about a week and a half on the phone. She never slept. We had these awesome conversations about our lives and what we wanted out of them, and where we wanted to go, places to travel, raising kids. We talked about music, cartoons, the old apartments, my divorces, being single. We talked about everything.
We connected, and I don’t know what probed her to look me up, or how she remembered after nine years, my name, what I looked like, my home state, where I now reside. I asked her how she found me, and asked why she wanted to look me up, and she told me that she had recently found her old agenda binder, and that my business card was still in tact. It piqued her curiosity, so she did a search, and out of nowhere, there I was. We spent a good nine days getting to know each other, and suddenly it came to a screeching halt.
I was confronted with some man calling my phone and slandering this wonderful girl who I have come to admire a lot. I didn’t know what to think or what to do. I withdrew, as any man would when some stranger tells you that the person you’ve taken
your walls down for, is all sorts of bad things. I stuck my proverbial tail between my legs and ran.
She called me and begged me to call her back, since I was not answering her calls. I suppose that when she sounded desperate enough, I called her back. We talked for a while about what the guy was saying about her, and she wanted to make things right again, and she explained that they were lies, and she told me the truth. I left her alone after that, once again, leaving her behind. I began preparing for the upcoming semester of college. I gave her emailed excuses of how busy I had been, and that I wouldn’t be able to talk any time soon. A few times she would email me that she was upset that I wouldn’t talk to her. I think I just needed some time to evaluate everything. She said that I reminded her of a movie. “How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days”- except that we stopped everything after nine days, and that we did not fall in love with each other. I suppose she was right to feel that way.
I’ve left her behind four times now, in the eleven years of her knowing me. What kind of man am I? We connected like I have never done with anyone, not even my ex-wives. There were only two, I am not a marrying man. I like talking to her. She gets me. She tells me that I make her want to excel in life, and succeed. That I make her laugh like she has never laughed before. We like each other, and I almost threw it away. There is a connection there that has always been there that was never met, until now. She says to me “Nobody has ever made me want to be something so much better than you have in one month’s time.” She tells me that I challenge her, and I do. She’s a smart girl. She’s told me that I bring out the good in her, though she’s just as evil as I am.
I was supposed to go to her hometown to visit my daughter and her for the holiday this weekend. Due to unforeseen events, I had to postpone that trip until the middle of next month. So now, I suppose that this is our time to get things back to where they were, because I really don’t want to leave her behind anymore. She has always wanted to get to know me, then here I am giving her that opportunity, and nobody is going to take that from us again. I don’t know what the future holds. All I do is remember the palm reading and give it a fair shot. As many tries as she’s given in to, she should be rewarded. It’s a journey I am willing to take with her. And the beat goes on.