I have the misfortune of having friends scattered across the country. This means that a lot of e-mails and phone calls end in “I miss you.”
Last week, as a long-distance catch-up phone call wound down, my very good friend Lindsay – who lives in Washington D.C. – told me that she misses me.
I miss her, too.
Since 2000, Lindsay and I have lived in the same part of the country for approximately four consecutive months. The rest of the time, there have been oceans, the mighty Mississippi, the Appalachian Mountains, and many hours of travel between us. We try to catch up once a week, but play a lot of phone tag and send diverting e-mails back and forth as the work day permits. For her birthday in April, I promised that I would make her dinner, but I am not sure when I will have the opportunity to cash in on that promise.
In the past six years, I have met three of the myriad of people she has had a crush on, I have seen few of the apartments she has lived in, and met few of her friends. Yet somehow, Lindsay and I make our friendship work – like I do with many of my long-distance friends.
The truth is, there will always be people that I miss with morbid curiosity, seizing morsels of information when presented and sizing up the course my life might have taken if, if only.
What would my life have been like if I was still with my first love, if I was still friends with my high school best friends, if my friends all lived in the same neighborhood, if I attainted that unattainable man that I loved with unreciprocated admiration? They are out there, in history, in my present, and in my future – invited or uninvited. It is just a matter of investigating curiosity’s itches at the right time, and remembering that although it might be the right time for me, it may be the exact wrong time for them.
Yesterday, in another brief catch-up e-mail, Lindsay told me that an old flame called her. She wasn’t around to answer and now has a voicemail hanging over her head. To call? Or not to call?
I find that it can take just as much strength for me to return an out-of-the-blue phone call after the break-up as it takes for me to not call him when I am going through the withdrawal of heartbreak.
Perhaps we will always remember, and always fight an addiction to curiosity and wonderment. Perhaps each and every time we encounter a sensory stimulant from the past (and scents are the worst), we will start the run down What-If Memory Lane.
People seem to have a sixth sense and know precisely the moment when I am forgetting, or have forgotten, or seem to have leveled out my life. For it is in that moment that they know to reappear and rip my tender heart to shreds again. Or, the universe senses that now! is the right second to let a man walk past me wearing that cologne, and my heart melts again, and I begin recalling all of those moments we had together. All of those good moments. And very few of the bad.
I wonder if I will miss forever. Or, if there will always be days like today, when stuck and trapped in my life, I look for airfare to go somewhere where there is a friend I haven’t seen in a while. To stop the missing. At least for now.
• "A Single Serving" appears second and fourth Mondays every month, exclusively in Lumino Magazine. E-mail Melissa at m.koss@yahoo.com.
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Written by Guest on 2006-09-25 13:28:41
In response to "to call" or "not to call?," the answer is a resounding "not to call." It's weird for her to be called an old flame. But glad to have made a guest appearance! Lrm |
there's hope
Written by Guest on 2006-09-25 14:04:40
I can say from experience that when you truly fall in love and become happily married, those echoes of ghosts past do quiet down. I really don't think about nor miss old flames.  |
Do they quiet down, or become silent?
Written by Guest on 2006-09-26 08:42:56
Do those ghosts quiet down? Or do they become silent? Silence is golden, so I wish that was the way the story goes. |
Never quiet
Written by Guest on 2006-10-20 10:50:46
My married friends tell me that the ghosts never quiet down. The memories of them always reverberate. |
From someone married
Written by Guest on 2006-10-23 10:45:50
Well, yes, memories never go away, but like anyone would think of a childhood memory...they fade pretty far away as time goes on. Hopefully, like me, you've married someone that blows those memories so far out of the water that there's no reason to think or fantasize about them anymore. |
