love story: chapter 6

Here it is. Chapter 6. I had to confirm a lot of these details with Kyle. If you’ve missed any of the story, you can catch up here!

CHAPTER 6

It was a long week and I couldn’t stop thinking about Kyle and the letter. So when Friday rolled around, I hadthose kind of butterflies. The does he like me, does he not ones. Do you know hard it is to be cool when all you can think is OMG, I’M NOT MADE OF BRONZE, TAKE ME IN YOUR ARMS AND KISS ME, YOU SILLY FOOL??

Kyle likes to tell the story about his family and friends coming to see the show on Friday night. It was a big deal that they had come, at all, so soon after Orion’s death, but they were all there. He loves to tell people that after the show, when he informed his younger brother Aaron and his best friends, A and K, that he was going to ask out that girl who played the Stage Manager, that they almost laughed in his face. Apparently, Aaron said something like, “Yeah, right. She’s way too hot for you.” I have asked him to tell me this story many, many times (partly as an ego boost when I’m having a bad day and partly to find out if this actually happened). The story has never changed so…good job, Kyle, for telling such a consistent whopper. Little did his family know when they came to see the play that they’d be stuck with me forever.

Kyle also really likes to talk about that Saturday night. We’d wrapped up curtain call and people were leaving, calling their ‘good nights’ to one another across the dressing room, the lobby, the parking lot. We would be ending the run soon and the cast was getting nostalgic. And I was on my way to a birthday party. Kyle must have felt concerned about me attending a wild party that late at night and alone because he and his roommate R informed me that they would be following me to this party. It was my friend S’s 28th and let’s just say, parties at S’s house did usually involve cake or balloons. When we arrived sometime after 11, the entire house seemed to be on its 9th tequila shot. I walked up the stairs and into the kitchen, Kyle and R in tow, at which point, we were greeted by a large man in chainmail with a sword (S spent her summer weekends working at the Renaissance Festival and well…if your job is that cool, who wouldn’t want to bring it home with them?). In fact, it seemed like the majority of partiers were dressed to the sword hilt in various and assundry pieces of armor. This wasn’t so unusual for a party at S’s and I forgot that I had brought unsuspecting guests into the medieval realm until I turned to see a very surprised R and Kyle being embraced by a pirate and a knight. We sat in a corner of the room, near the drinks, and I perched on Kyle’s knee. (Yeah, okay, I was looking for ANY reason to get close to him!)

And there was that feeling again…that feeling that we had been doing this always, that when I woke up tomorrow, I might not be able to remember if we had sat like this once or 687,000 times. Someone who had possibly just taken their 10th tequila shot pushed past our chairs and my face pressed closer to Kyle’s. He looked at me and I just knew he was going to kiss me. “Not here,” I said brazenly, like he was Leonard Whiting and I was Olivia Hussey, because I really, really did not want to associate our first kiss with chainmail and booze. (Although, apparently, I have anyway). It’s another weird example of somehow knowing before we knew. Somehow…in the back of my mind, I thought, this is going somewhere long-term and I have to remember it. We said our goodbyes pretty quickly and as R headed for the pick-up, Kyle walked me to the door of my van. I opened it and climbed up onto the step. When I turned around, I was taller than he was. I put my arms around his neck. And he kissed me.



First kisses can be terrible. They’re nervous, sweaty things with bad timing and ill-placed noses and awkward finishes. Not this one. This one, I can objectively say, was perfect. There was like a choir and bells and a twenty-four gun salute and it was awesome. He kissed me again and R honked his horn and began cat-calling loudly.

“See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, see you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Kiss.

“Night.”

“Night.”

TO BE CONTINUED

love, elizabeth

Our Love Story (Chapter 1)

 

Smithereens

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

- Ani Difranco

There’s a tiredness that comes after a good cry. Maybe it’s the way the sinuses feel like pinched, old sea-beds or your cheeks crack with salt or that impossible way your limbs fold inwards as if to wrap themselves around you again and again. And it had been a good cry. The kind of cry that makes you think 17 is the most brutal year to have your heart broken. I’m sure the other years suck, too, but at any rate, it was a January night. A January night and freezing, when the 15-passenger van began to spin out of control and directly into oncoming traffic. They warn you about black ice but until you experience it on a dark Idaho highway in the middle of the night…well, it’s hard to explain the sleepy, slow motion feeling of sitting up and staring out at the semi-truck that’s about to hit you. A wide-eyed second where you think if the van doesn’t move in the next 2 seconds, you will be dead. But that cry made you so good and tired that for a moment you actually think, go ahead and smash me into smithereens. I can’t possibly feel worse. By the way, I turned out to be very, very wrong. And no, that semi-truck did not hit the van. Metaphorically, though…Well, let’s just say until you’re almost hit by a semi-truck, you’ll go on thinking that little Chevy pick-up is the real deal. You’d be wrong.

Two days after I survived near-oblivion by way of semi, I walked into the theatre building at my college. It was a first read-through for a play called Our Town. I am not even kind of exaggerating when I say that Thornton Wilder is responsible for all of this. It was at that read-through that I first saw Kyle.

Sometimes I imagine there were fireworks or explosions or dancing beams of light haloing around his head while The Bangles sang “Eternal Flame” and  a choir of heavenly angels announced, ELIZABETH, BEHOLD, YOUR SOULMATE DOTH ARRIVE AND LO, HE IS WEARING A GREEN BEANIE!

That did not happen.

In fact, it was days, weeks even, before I would really notice the shy skateboarder with the long green hair who hadn’t really wanted to be an actor but was there, all the same. It would take longer than that even to know what I know now. That I was a goner the second I walked into that first rehearsal. I didn’t need a semi-truck to smash me to smithereens. I was about to go humpty-dumpty all over the place. And if you think comparing falling in love to being hit by a truck is a little melodramatic…you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To Be Continued