I find myself missing someone lately. Someone I never expected to miss. Especially as intensly as I do. Maybe it is the rain that hasn't seemed to stop for days now. Maybe it is all the Pablo Narudo in the air surrounding me. Or maybe it is just a longing for much simpler days. Days when it was so easy to love.
His name was Christopher and he had beautiful hands. The type of hands I always wanted to touch. He is the only boy with a disability I have ever been involved with. And he will probably always be the only one. I was 15 and he was 20 when we first met briefly, at Shriners Hospital no less. He told me I was gorgeous. The perversity of it is still appealing to me to this day. It seemed so scandalous and forbidden, yet wonderfully innocent. We didn't meet again till I was 17 and he was 22. He still thought I was gorgeous.
I always believed him when he told me I was beautiful. He didn't want anything from me. He always meant what he said. As freaks we could see in each other the twisted appeal that everyone else found repulsive. He was the first boy to kiss me. I still remember what his hands felt like on my face when he did.
Because we knew I would be leaving for college at the end of the summer when I was 18, we kept things simple. We didn't want to become too involved in something we knew would have to end. Even at age 18 I was aware of the complications relationships bring. The week before I left for school we spent every day together. He was my best friend. My only friend. The day before I left he gave me a book of poems and prose by Pablo Narudo. He had marked a page, but made me promise not to open to it until I was sitting in my new dorm room in college. So while alone in my empty room my very first night away from home I turned to the page he had marked, to a part of a poem he had underlined :
"I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul."
It could have never worked out between he and I in the long run. He lacked ambition, as so many disabled people do. And it will always be unfortunate to me. Because he was good at loving me, and I was good at receiving it. It is the only time I have enjoyed someone caring about me more than I care about them. Honestly, I wouldn't change a thing about what we shared. It is perfect in its unbalanced imperfection. It is a love with character.
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