Oh, man. Am I really writing about this?

I have a first date on Saturday. What, exactly, is supposed to be accomplished on a first date? You are commissioned to be the very coolest, most interesting version of yourself, so as to secure a second date. It seems to me that first dates consist so much of making sure you are intriguing that you don't listen to the other person try to advertise their own best facets. First dates are forced narcissism disguised as outward interest. I can count on one hand the number of first dates that I have been on. I usually go through the side door, doing the friends thing that turns into the whatever comes after friends thing. I am, admittedly, a relationship girl. But maybe more than that, I am a spark girl.
A little while back, I wrote about the first time I was ever in love. Like, IN. LOVE. Though I would never put myself back in that relationship, I find that I have been dissatisfied by anything that made me feel...less. So, against, better judgement, here is an account of that spark. As written by a girl recently back out of what she had hoped was love.

I was 21 years old when I met him. Quietly sweeping fallen leaves from the store front, I was wearing a flowered scarf on my head to hide unshampooed, salt-bitten hair. I had a green tank top, a long white skirt and tan lines. I had just moved to the mystery Caribbean from the mountains of Colorado, and I was going for "islandy." I was new.
He sat on the wooden bench behind me and asked my name. Where was I from? I had not even known he was there until he spoke. And it was unremarkable, wasn't it? That curious boy with brown curls and deep eyes and a gap between his front teeth said hello and walked down to the beach and I thought nothing of it.
Did I know that he was beautiful? How could I have not seen that?
One, or maybe two nights after that first encounter, we had just gotten back to Maho from town with a group of rum-drunk twenty somethings who all gleefully ran up the boardwalk stairs to their own tents. He turned to me at the top of my own staircase,this boy whose name I did not know, grabbed my hand and said, "Let's go." And then I was with that curious boy in the Caribbean Sea, mindless and thinking out loud that more stars seemed to fall from the sky there than ever hung where I came from. He thought that was beautiful. He thought I was beautiful and he held my hand under the clear water and showed me bioluminescence as he guided my fingers with ocean fireflies. My God, I had no idea who he was that night, but I could not have named another soul. No one else existed.
The solid Earth I had been standing on began to crack open, and he kissed me. I barely knew his name and he was the only thing I could see.

We moved in together two weeks later. There was nothing to question, and questions were never asked. Not even by those around us. It was clear that we were supposed to be together, and so we never entertained logical thought about it. We were, then, together because we couldn't not be together.
That first year. That first year was the Garden State Soundtrack and Christmas lights hung on deck railings and doors always open to soulmates and kindred weirdos and people who loved each other at our best and at our living-in-Spring-Break worst. There was a softness that year, and I felt the entire thing to the very tips of my toes.
And him. He would play his guitar shirtless and tanned, his curls reaching for his dark eyes.
There was no television. No internet. We had one cell phone and never bothered to look at it. We did not have distractions from one another, and so we fell explosively in love. Deeply, and with true madness.
Our bungalow had screen for walls and vinyl for a roof and we slept to the white noise of a box fan and tree frogs and the laughter and music of new friends on the green hill we were coming to call our own. I would read out loud to him. From my books, from my journals, from whatever he wanted. And he would play his songs. I would curl against him and he would brush my salty hair out of my eyes, strum his guitar and say, "This song is you." My fingertips would trace his ears, his neck, his face. And then we would run to the sea, the way we did the night we began to understand everything, and we would strip off our clothes. Pad through the white glowing sand and disappear in the midnight water, cold until we were warm, the fireflies tracing our bodies.

Explosions, by their very nature, do not sustain. They are an instant. They spend all of their energy illuminating the entire sky until nothing is left to burn.

We began to argue. And we could not figure out how to stop.


What did we have to argue about? I can't remember now. The flames lasted for about a year until they sucked all the oxygen out of the air and died. The end was incineration, as nothing that intense ends easily. We were all or nothing. A sparkler, meant to exist as lovers and burn out.
I can remember the very last time I saw him. He was wearing a red shirt and he wheeled a small suitcase behind him, past the tent we lived and loved and fought in together for that fiery year. He was leaving our little island, the one we both stayed on just to keep close to each other. It had been more than a year since we were us. A good deal of life had happened in the interim, and we were beyond repair.
We walked by each other like the history was false, like we always did. As if our first year was some sunlit Narnia, a Never Never Land impossible to revisit. But we looked at each other this time. I am not sure what I wish I would have said. When I really think about it, there may have been nothing to say. But to pass by him like that--this curious boy who took my entire world and showed me how to love and showed me who I could be--to just walk by him, my head darting down as soon as I saw his face, felt unjust. Due weight was not given.
I could not have touched him or we would have combusted. But could I have thanked him? Could I have finally leveled with him that moment? Just the two of us, ending as strangers the way we started.
I will never see him again. I know this to be true. There is no chance of running into this boy on another wooden bench somewhere, and there is no other Caribbean Sea.
I should have told him at least--at the very tail end of least--that I was grateful to him for showing me how much I could feel. The regret is in the muted, matte ending. Where we walked by each other on a creaky boardwalk, inches away from the person who had been bigger than any empty space, and said nothing.





I will probably delete this post as soon as this wine wears off. But I think some of the issues I have with boredom, particularly in the light of dating, can be directly attributed to this island boy and the kind of spark that doesn't actually last, anyway.

Chasing sparklers.