Shadow Puppet Storyteller

When Your Bubble Bursts

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Welcome To My Reality Forum  (E) Prompts to help you blog about real life and more... #1967461 by Sunny

The prompt: Has anyone ever entered your life who has changed it drastically? Was it for the better or for the worst? Tell us about this person.

I found out on May 6th that a friend from high school passed away from cancer -- He was taken at age forty-nine. May is my birthday month, and I just "turned 49," which means I have completed forty-nine years of life. In the moments after being born, you are in your first year. That's the true accounting, which, I think, most people don't like facing -- we finagle the numbers. I am counting 2016, going forward, as my fiftieth year, no regrets.

As it relates to the prompt, I do regret that I loved someone deeply for forty-nine years, but never used my writing to its full potential to describe it. I still do not know if I can. I could write the single word, "love" to sign my name to a Christmas card. I could scheme to impress, or get close, but that was the extent of my social ability to breach the boundaries of cliques, expectations, awe. Especially when the feelings were strong and i had that person within reach, I lived in denial -- the more I ended up knowing about the person he was and became, I realized just how deeply I was in denial except for being in some idealized version of what our love could be.

I do know that I had a short poem written in high school, and it was straight from that dream land I let him and I love in. I think my best friend may have even published it in our senior yearbook (the year after he was already in the world, attending Georgetown university).

I am grateful that I transformed a sliver of that immature poem into the seed for a more dramatic scene in a book chapter; but decades later. And evenso, by that time, that story was my terribly frustrated passion mixing two factual, if idealized crushes into one fictional character --my desirable male protagonist. At the time, it would sit for a decade as nothing more than a static item.

The real reason this person's death has changed my perception drastically comes from seeing what all the circles of friends shared upon being shocked on facebook by the announcement of his passing. Suddenly, I realized I was not the only one who received loving attention from John. The life-long truth of his existence was being repeated by hundreds of gentle comments in that week. I always placed him in a category that he was unobtainable -- and yet, he was available, he made himself available, a good listener, a wry tease, good to look at, tasteful. All the things I saw, other people had seen. and i do not know why i was always keeping us separated by soap bubbles. that arms-length admiration, but just aware enough to be honest that I desired him, but there was something no one would deny -- he never belonged to any of us.