Day 231 - Resurfacing - Chapter 1 (1180 Words)

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Resurfacing

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1

“Are you dead?” I asked, knowing the answer already but hoping for something else.
“Yeah” She looked back into me with her eyes that were as blue as that lake had been that summer.
Death made some bizarre sense to me now, the only thing that could make sense these days. It's been eighteen years, and she's still a schoolgirl where I became, what? Middle aged? A middle aged man with a schoolgirl obsession?
Jesus. Could I be a bigger cliché?
She's sixteen, a girl in the middle of her teens and despite the years engulfing the time between us, I'm right here with her in my own sixteen year old mind. The feelings of intense, bursting emotions that formed that summer, that lay unforgiving in my chest, threatened to explode into life again, overwhelming me once more. Teenagedom had been like that, everything was better and worse than later life. The lows were cavernous and the highs were stratospheric, this was all there was and all there could be when you were that age. Now in my late thirties it was exhilarating to feel like that again, to believe in the power of nothing so much that it clouded out reason and responsibility.
There it is again, we are hand in hand, though I'm not sure we ever got that far? Did we progress to public displays of affection? We knew that we were interested, we knew we were all we had and could ever have, but did every one else? Did they even need to know that?
Walking to school, a slacker attitude developed in the later years, we called them forms then, I have no idea what you would call them now. They were, we were, sixteen that year and now it still feels like we are, or maybe I am. She is after all dead, we had established that already.
Regrets have followed me down through the years, and they tailed me from this moment onwards. I don't understand why I am here again now, and I'm not sure I really want to. This is a dream, a delusion or a miracle. Either one of those options would potentially be destroyed by knowing it fully, and that is too high a price to pay, to stop feeling the sunburst of emotion. The whole sensation is simply unreal, and far too real to be real. I know that makes little sense, but that is the paradigm I am faced with, I know inside but I really would rather remain in blissful ignorance.
She smiles at me and it is moving from her eyes to my cheeks, it is an infection I happily take on and once more a flood of feeling washes around me. My heart is beating as a gentle hand touches my arm, her fingerprints embedding themselves in the skin of my forearm, or so my romantic imagination would have me believe.
“My little cauliflower.” She says, laughing her way through the name. It was a pet name, one we used to amuse ourselves back in the day. Well, more realistically it was a name she used to amuse herself when referring to me, it sounded romantic in French, le petit chou-fleur, but in English it was a dull, pasty white and tasteless monstrosity.
Her arm goes around me and nestles in the small of my back, I can feel it there with every little movement we make now as we walk along the road, not heading to the school grounds but to the lake, it was too good a day to not go there and at least see how beautifully it took to the day.
That makes more sense now, I'm back in the day, that day and reliving the past through this... whatever it is. That day was just like this, even though it was eighteen years ago this is bigger than recalling the events, not obsessing but re-experiencing them. Recreating them maybe? In a way more real than reality could afford almost two decades later on?
I should stop this, but I can't and I won't. I have dreamed about this for so long, it haunted my waking and sleeping hours for every day since that one. Now that I have it again, the feeling and the place, no matter how mad it may be? That is nothing I want to let go of, nothing I could possibly allow myself to let go of. There's a connection now, a deeper line between us that never existed when we were here the first time. The electricity of touch, well beyond the hormonal rush and the tingling excitement of puberty taking control, is harsher and brighter than ever before. That smile, the one that dances in her eyes and infects me with it's strength, that is like a lifeline to me and I can feel the tension as she pulls on it with every muscle movement.
It isn't pain, and pain had been the one constant that dogged me from this day forward, the hurt that would not die, the reminder than floated behind my eyes, always there but not forever in direct sight. It hovered persistently and while I never accepted it's presence, the relentless reminder of things gone wrong, it became like a companion to me, never not by my side.
Until now that was, now it was... gone.
Light fills my eyes as the arm snaked around me constricts, pulling and twisting me willingly into an embrace. The light is bright and full, but also soft and warm. Like a Hollywood version of heaven all clouds and white but all encompassing without the glare. Her hair is soft to my cheeks as she nestles down towards my neck, she's just a little shorter than me, I have grown so little since that time. Nothing much has changed expect the shortening of my life expectancy perhaps.
“I miss you.” She says, but she is not looking at me, but at the lake. We are on the path leading to the reserve, the pine scented alleys of the peninsula and the nature walk, signposted and well worn. There's an opening, a clearing that shows the glassy surface of the water itself, calm and serene.
Does she miss me or does she miss the place? Given the way we left things it seems to me that she could be equally at home with either situation.
The fear and doubt in that question is swelling in me, the emotions all teen-aged and overblown are taking away all the intensity from the loved up reality where I had been so happy only moments ago. The light dimmed, the air chilled and the lake went from glass to tears. Again it's an over romanticised version of the way things are, a pantomime of life overacted and overplayed. All I want now is to go home, I know it and now she does too, that's how close the connection is.
She kisses me.
And I no longer desire to go home.

I am home.