The second weirdest thing that has ever happened to me, Part II.

Remember that part in Win a Date with Tad Hamilton where Rosalee recounts the story of her romantic date to her friends and she says, My foot hit the ground and I turned to take one last look at Tad and you're all swoony, thinking, in your thirteen year old mind, I can't wait until I step into a car looking back at a boy feeling like leaving him will be the hardest task of my life because I have been so madly in love with him? Do you remember?

Good. 

Because this story is nothing like that. 

I sat in the back seat as the others opened their doors and got out of the car. I couldn't do it yet, so I sat there with my beating heart. It had been four years since our last encounter. The last time we'd spoken was the summer before our senior year of high school, and he kissed me, and you know, we don't have to rehash all of that. But, no, why don't we? He kissed me while he still had a girlfriend and the last time it was good, it was basically me saying So, are you going to choose me or what and him saying I don't know I'll figure it out but let's keep kissing so that's what we did. I think the next day, I told him that I felt like the worst person in the entire world and then I thought everyone hated me but they really didn't, so that was good. But I hated myself, so that wasn't ideal.

And anyway, we didn't talk after that because he was nervous I was telling everyone which would give him a sort of undesired reputation and also, I think he was nervous that I was telling a different story than he was, which I actually was doing, but I was telling the true version.

But back to that time a couple of weeks ago when I stepped out of the car and was sick about how I was only moments away from facing my demons...

I found courage in my legs to make them move, and maybe it wasn't even courage, but whatever it was, it came by way of my legs, and I pulled the door handle toward me and stepped out of my safe zone with tinted windows.

He was behind me, greeting those who'd already gotten out of the car because he hadn't seen them in over two years. Just a quick little reminder, he hadn't seen me in four. I took a deep breath and turned myself around to see his face. I examined his hair, the way it was short and clean cut like it didn't used to be. He looked at me, squinting the dark eyes that used to make me feel whole, looking like he'd just swallowed an oversized pill. 

     "Wow," he said. I swallowed, too. 

     "Hi, it's been a while..." 

     "Uh, huh," He put his long arms around me so gently, like I might break. I wanted to tell him that that was a worry four years too late. "Blast from the past for sure," he said. 

     And "Yeah," I nodded back. 

We sat on his driveway in a circle, the six of us, laughing about how Ray and Missy were still the same and how Haley has looked similar to her adult self her whole entire upbringing, and how Rachel was still going by Densley and then something about "The Band" that made the whole conversation turn uncomfortable incredibly fast but I didn't really care because I was uncomfortable the entire time. 

He asked me what I was doing with my life and I had trouble answering. The pages of one thousand some-odd journal entries flew through my mind as I remembered everything about the first time we shared a blanket on February 15th, March 26th when he held my hand and it was new, about that time his dad caught us pulling out of the city library one afternoon when he wasn't supposed to be seeing me at all. And mostly, I thought about four years ago when "The Five Year Plan" was written and how, had it still been in effect, I would be marrying this man, this stranger, in two months.

Back then, we had so much more to talk about: the names of the children we'd raise on old movies and cheap hamburgers, the arguments we'd have on deciding which dog to pick, the dreams we shared about moving far away from our parents. 

That night, we discussed my schooling, how I wanted to be a writer some day, and how he was going to write music scores for movies after he graduates.

And I was happy for the both of us. 

Because we weren't a part of each other anymore,

but we were both so brilliant on our own,

more stunning than we ever could have been together. 

It was all different, 

and it was all so beautiful. 

And so, my foot hit the ground, I turned to take one last look at him,

and loved the way it felt to not be able to feel him anymore at all. 

So, that's the story of the second weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. 

Maybe one day I'll get to the first weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. It's pretty good.