Winter

Brent brought me flowers. For no reason, other than it is the dead of winter and sometimes we all need a little more Spring time in our snow. He is sweet like that.

***
I remember years ago sitting on the floor of my bedroom, phone to my ear. I'm telling him how much I need color, smells, dirt. I'm starting to cry, telling him how I just hate the winter, the cold, and all that it represents. Now, so many years later, I have more insight and could tell you exactly why I was feeling so tied down and confused, but then summer twisted around like smoke inside of me, haunting me with it's memories. Horses. Sweat. Hot summer nights playing games under the stars. Summer means getting away - leaving this house that feels like a prison and running free, free, free, backpacking to places no one could find me if I didn't want them to. Clean air and the most liberating feelings of independence.
Lyrics catch up to me and I hear Counting Crows in my ear. "Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white."
I fall asleep wishing I wasn't here, in the winter, in my room, in High School.
The following day I make it to my room after school, breathing in sharply when I get there. Flowers. Every shape, color and size - not a square inch of my room isn't covered in flowers. They are draped over the computer, scattered over the bed, laying thick like carpet on the floor. I smile - a small note in his handwriting lays at my feet. "It looks like spring to me". And I laugh at what my dad's reaction will be when he sees that my boyfriend, who is in college, has broken (again) the rule of: No Boys In The Bedroom!
We dated for four years. Well, three, and wrote for one on his mission. Then he came home and left the Church. I fought to find common ground between dating and caring, and somehow in the middle of it all, we lost touch. I saw him with his fiance once. She stared at me because I'm something from his disconnected past. I stared at her because she was something from his future. Although I tried not to, I glanced at her ring and found myself trying to convince myself it wasn't supposed to be mine, anyway. Now they live happily in India, where he's studying at the University of Calcutta, and I'm married to the most wonderful person I can imagine being married to. And just like that there are two happy endings.
***

No wonder by the time life has wrinkled our skin and taken the color from our hair that we end up just talking talking talking about the people that used to be in our lives, the things that we have seen. "Oh yes, so and so. I knew her great Aunt Lucy. Good blood. There was this one time when . . . . . . . . "

There are days that I remember these things and my heart shutters because we were real. And those feelings were real. And even with how real it was, they could never be Brent. I mean that not so much in the cheesy way it sounds, but underneath that, in all that it really means. It's amazing - life and all of it's crazy tunnels that in the end have us standing with a past, with a future, with all these memories that determine our response to so many biases. I usually remember, smile and then say (sometimes out loud) "Wow. I really loved them." - stated, like a fact. Then I smile at how many beautiful people God allowed me to love, and give me love, so that I wouldn't wither and die until I found the one I would love for eternity.