Excerpt 6

I have no idea why I dreamed about you last night. It’s been, what, eight years since I last saw you? It was the fall, and you’d tracked down my phone number through a mutual acquaintance. You just wanted to see me again. You wanted to catch up. My girlfriend at the time was okay with that. She trusted me. I trusted me.

We met at a pizza parlor on White Lane. We shared some potato wedges and drinks, just like the old times. You’d dyed your hair black since I’d last seen you, and you were skinnier than I ever remembered. You looked hungry, and angry. And lost. It was weird talking to you again. You didn’t seem to know why exactly you’d tracked me down. There were painful, awkward silences. Before had been so good…

…We met when I was 16 and you were 17. It was in a journalism class in high school. Honestly, I’d never given you a second thought. You spent a lot of time with your best friend, who often shot catcalls in my general direction whenever I was stumbling about the classroom, throwing out orders. I was an editor. I didn’t really pay that much attention to it. But eventually, I did. Your friend hated me. But you didn’t.

We started dating. Your friends hated me. My friends didn’t give a crap about you. It was the fall. It was always the fall. You’d sit, cross-legged, in the yellow and brown leaves and I’d lie with my head in your lap. We’d talk as you ran your fingers through my long dyed hair. It was black. Your hair was a natural strawberry-blond. And we’d kiss…

A lot of things happened in the four months we were together. A good number of them amazing. I think I experienced things I’ve never experienced since. Feelings that were so new, and so special. Our relationship was intense… Passionate… But things ended badly. You believed your friends, who hated me. You started to hate me. So, I left you. And we didn’t talk again until you called me out of the blue, eight years ago.

Earlier this year, your sister tracked me down on MySpace. She lives in Texas now and wanted to know how I was doing, for some reason. She remembered me, even though she was just a kid when we were together. You never came up in any of the conversations. I never found out what she wanted to know or why she was checking up on me. After a handful of messages back and forth, she stopped contacting me.

I don’t have any photographs of you. The breakup was bad. I burned everything that reminded me of you. I was an angry 16-year-old, burning photographs of someone I never wanted to see again. But I did see you again. And it’s been ages since. You only seem to exist in my memories these days. My memories and, apparently, my dreams…