There’s always one isn’t there?
Those that know me will roll their eyes and think they know the answer to this one, and they’ll be right. There’s only one answer to this one.
In this case, the answer to both statements is found in one person. A person who has come to mean a great deal to me both for what we once were, what we became, and what still lies in the future. For various reasons, that future is, and always will be, platonic, but there was a time – what seems like a long time ago now – when it wasn’t. First loves always hurt a little, a special kind of sting reserved for the heart’s first venture into belonging to someone else. Mine was no exception.
I didn’t date in high school. So I don’t have any memories of cheering my sweetheart on in whatever competition he may have been championing. My purpose in life as a teenager was to be invisible, and I was good at it. It wasn’t until I stumbled, knock-kneed and awkward (and yet, in many ways bearing that same over-confidence that is the plague of all teenagers), into my first professional acting job out of high school, that anyone noticed me at all. That’s not to say that I noticed that I was being noticed. It would take nearly 5 years and a lot of growing up on my part to even acknowledge that attraction on my part.
At 22, while no longer hiding, I was of the opinion that no one would be bothered with me – despite the fact that the glasses were now sleeker and more sophisticated and my teeth were now beautifully straight and free of wire, I looked in the mirror and still saw the awkwardly bespectacled, wire-mouthed eighteen-year-old I had been during that first roller-coaster-fresh-out-high-school ride. He brought me out of that. He didn’t just teach me how to be a girl, he taught me how to be a woman (and I don’t mean that in the crude way…quite the opposite in fact), he was my solace, my escape in times of trouble…my safe harbour.
He was also several years my senior and those things never are simple or, sadly, meant to thrive. Society is harsh and judgemental on things it doesn’t understand. While it was easier to blame the way things fell apart on him at the time (and I did, oh trust me I did), the truth is that looking back I really don’t know who was more at fault, him or me. He made the call, but looking back I know it couldn’t have been easy for him. The last thing he ever wanted was to hurt me. With my 20/20 hindsight vision, I can clearly see now that he was right and I’ve long since forgiven him – but at the time – I would have done anything for him, would have given up anything for him.
I stayed that way for a long time.
Until as late as a few years ago, if he’d asked for me back he would have had me in a heartbeat…and then somewhere along the line something changed. Perhaps it was coming to ships, and finding my own two feet underneath me on the water, or perhaps it was going to England, and living my own life – with the lessons he had taught me as guidance – for the first time. Whatever it was, I stopped yearning for him and started respecting him. He became instead a milestone, a marker in my life that I would never, and will never regret.
There have been others, some of whom I’ve loved more, or just differently, and still – somewhere out there beyond the horizon – I know there’s one out there waiting for me to sail into their life.
But for that one man who taught me so much about who I was, who I could be, and who I would become…there is a small part of me who will always imagine what life would have been like if I’d stayed his Jane Eyre…
And a larger part of me will always be deeply grateful for the fact that he allowed me to move on from being exactly that.