My first foggy recollection as a child was getting stung by a wasp. I remembered being too small to open the door of my parents’ Hamptons house and the relief I felt when my mother rescued me. I remembered her quieting my cries as she looked down at me with tender eyes and a soothing voice while she sprinkled powder on my bite to get the sting out. And I remembered very little after, just the lingering feeling that I was safe.
In searching through those memories, I remembered a bike ride on top of the handlebars and somewhere between that, a string of nights spent with my mother in bed when I got the flu. She’d kicked my father out of their room and slept with me. I could still feel her cold hands on my hot back. A few childhood friends drifted through my memories as well, not exact memories but words and gestures, indistinct moments in places I couldn’t remember. One of my classmates had died of pneumonia. She had blonde curly hair and big dimples. When she passed, I was observed by the adults around me in such a way I knew I was expected to grieve. Because of that expectation, I pretended to cry, but the concept of death was lost on me. I recall feeling bad as the casket was lowered to the ground because I felt nothing and everyone around me wasn’t pretending. Their tears were real. It was the first time I felt guilty.
Everyone had those moments, where those bits and pieces surfaced, and memories were triggered, some of them more significant than others. Some of them a mystery as to why they stood out from the rest. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, twenty-four hours in a day. What would I remember when I was forty?
It seemed incomprehensible no matter how well you know another person, that you could never fully understand them, and what memories they kept and why they were significant. I had no idea what my friend’s name was that passed away, no idea whose handlebars I was riding on, but I do know the most vivid childhood memory I held was the day I met Ian Kemp.
“Good morning.”
Ian greeted me as I stood on my back porch sipping a cup of coffee in light cotton sleep shorts and the same cami I had on the night before. The waves rolled in and crashed against the rocky shore in front of me. I was far too deep in my reverie to do anything more than lift my cup and give him a low reply. “Morning.”
“Listen,” Ian said, stepping off his porch and making his way toward me, forcing me back into the moment. Delighted that his shirt was inevitably off, his newly tanned feet made good time between our houses. He stood on the bottom step of my porch, his back to the rail as he followed my line of sight and studied the waves with me. “Last night. You took me by surprise, but I want you to know I understood what you were saying.”
“Okay.” I rolled my eyes as I wrapped my arms around myself, still holding my cup as a buffer between us. No matter how determined I was to be unapologetic about my newly adopted philosophies, I still felt a bit self-conscious about sharing that new part of myself, about voicing my thoughts to those who might not be so receptive or understanding.
“There’s no reason to get defensive.”
I shrugged, looking down at my cup. “Sorry.” I didn’t want to reveal more than I already had, but I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t slightly embarrassed. “I haven’t ever really said those things out loud. But if you are thinking I’m the weirdo hippie with healing crystals, who is walking around concerned about higher consciousness, you are barking up the right tree.”
“You have no idea what I’m thinking,” he said softly.
Unable to believe his sincerity, I defended myself. “I’m not some quack, you know. I lived years out there, in that world.” I gestured toward the ocean. “And I decided to unplug. A lot of people are doing it and we all have our reasons.”
“Again,” he said, taking another step up. “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve labeled me the crazy lady next door.”
“No,” he said, taking another step and taking my cup away from me. “I don’t think you’re crazy at all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing a little soul-searching.”
Soul-searching?
Soul-searching.
I’d spent the last year inside myself, and at times questioned if I was losing my mind.
In mere seconds he had simplified it so… perfectly.
Soul-searching!
I chuckled at how na?ve I’d been to expect that no one else would understand what I was going through and felt a weight lift from my shoulders. Ian had just put it all into perspective in seconds.
In that moment, I wanted to throw my arms around him in gratitude. Instead, I watched him as he took a sip of my coffee. “Oh, man this brew could kill a horse.”
“Like it?”
“Hell yes.”
I grinned, and he grinned back keeping my cup in his hand. He glanced at me over the lifted cup before he spoke. “In my creative writing class, I deal with a lot of saturated minds and half of their problem is they want to expand those minds past the walls they built around themselves to become better people, better writers, but how do they do that? What tools could I give them?”
“You can’t, right? They have to experience things for themselves, figure out how to open their own minds.”
He nodded. “And that’s exactly what I tell them. Unless they want their intellectual palate to be the size of the box of knowledge they already possess, they have to get out there and gain some real-life experience to add to that imagination. It’s what makes the writing authentic and original.”
“Can’t write about a broken heart as well as a broken heart can?”
“Precisely. How do you ever really know true living if you do it vicariously?” He looked at me attentively. “And what if… what if that person sipping coffee in the background of your life, what if they,” he said pausing to take another sip, “are the next chapter?”
My heart galloped as I stuttered through my next sentence. “So, w-what you’re saying,” I managed to mutter keeping my door opened for his invitation, “is that you get what I was saying.”
He chuckled as he followed me into the house, and I pulled another mug from my cabinet pouring us both a fresh cup. We sat there wordlessly sipping for a few minutes. I glanced over at him, but his eyes remained fixed on the sea.
“This place,” he said low before shifting his gaze to mine, “I never really appreciated how beautiful it was until now.”
Heart hammering, I made quick work of changing the subject. Some part of me knew that I was seconds away from offering Ian more than coffee and small talk. The way he undressed me with his eyes, not only to my bare skin but deeper, had me squirming where I stood.
“You know, Ian, you said something to me when we were kids that stuck with me.”
“Oh?” The twinkle in his eye was gratification enough, but I still paid him the compliment.
“You were only, what, fourteen?”
He nodded.
“You told me even if I was mad, or humiliated, or scared to have fun anyway.”
He grinned at the thought, surprised. “I did?”
I nodded. “You did. Pretty insightful for a kid who told me I didn’t have tits big enough to be called a miss.” Ian chuckled and it made my stomach flutter.
“You made a bit of an impression on me,” I confessed, my back to him while I dug through my cabinet and threw the ingredients on the counter. Turning back to him satisfied, I saw his face light up in recognition.
“You’re an addict,” he commented as he saw the mass amounts of chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers I kept on hand.
“I told you, you didn’t give yourself enough credit, Professor Kemp. You taught me well.”
He gawked at the massive pile of chocolate on my multi-colored tile island. “So, are we dining on s’mores for breakfast, then?”
Disco chose that moment to raise the Devil’s hell from her box in his living room. “Guess not,” he said with the shake of his head.
“I would go get her, but I’m allergic.”
“And full of shit. You are a terrible liar and that’s a wonderful thing, Koti.”
Ian put his empty cup on the counter and moved to free Disco from her box of shackles. He paused at my back door. “How about tonight? I’ll set up one of our bonfires for old times’ sake?”
“I was beginning to think you forgot.”
His grin took my breath. “Quite the opposite.”