Falling

Each fall I arrive on a day like today. It takes me to a melancholy place. Sometimes it's just for a few minutes, sometimes it's all day, sometimes it lasts for a few days. Today it came for a little bit and then passed. The gray, clouds, windy, leaves blowing, cool weather. I had my music on at home and this came on...

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Now playing: Bob Marley - Coming In From the Cold
via FoxyTunes

I'm laying on the couch, it's the middle of the night, literally. She's on another couch across the small den. We are both seniors in high school. The cat, Merona, travels back and forth between us, and we talk until morning. It's fall outside, cozy in the house. Music plays from some hidden speakers. She introduced me to Bob Marley. At first, I couldn't hear the English, couldn't quite make it out.

It was the beginning of a tight friendship that lasted through the first months of college. I was never clear on how that year long friendship ended. She stopped talking to me and that was it.

It had started from a school assignment. She had written an essay about me comparing me to a fictional character I can't even remember. I had heard through a mutual friend that it had been read aloud in class. We went to a small school, graduating class of 140, the other students had to guess who the essay had been written about...
An odd start.

It was only later, hindsight, always so much clearer, that I figured that I had fallen for her. She's straight, as far as I know. There was no "hanky panky" between us, but for me I think it was a first love. Unrequited, but real.

Today, this fall, this is what I remembered.

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