by Cole Savage
I was born slow, Nicki, but I’m picking up speed. When I was young I thought I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be a professional football player, but upon a series of unfortunate events, that dream dashed and exploded like a black star, and as I got older, just getting out of Franklin seemed like a victory because after you left it was hard to breathe there knowing how small my world had become. It’s difficult for me to understand the thought process of people in small towns, like Franklin. You can love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, but nothing ever changes, and in the end, you become another part of its decaying parts if you don’t walk away. My growth laid static in Franklin, dulled to sleep by the tired repetition of nothing happening day after day. The people felt and looked the same, their color leached out, like they’d settled knowing there was something better just beyond the hills, beyond the dead-end roads, but for whatever reason they were chained to the town because of recidivist behavior. What I call blind loyalty and fidelity to a dying idea, maybe a lethargy of custom or lack of imagination, but I also understand that it’s in these quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you find the salt of the earth people who make you feel at home, people who know how to love you because you are part of them.
When I went back into Karen’s house after so many years, I was walking across the threshold of a house that had forgotten me, but yet, held so many pieces of me—a part of my soul. After you left, besides wishing you back, I wished that I could cleanse myself of my old life, leave my sorrows by the way side and figure out a way to move past my losses—find a new shore, a new frontier free of all my memories—something that would give me peace and sleep, but then I realized that it was those memories that drove me to do the things I never could have done. Nicki, it was your ghost that kept me alive when you were gone. I can’t count how many times I imagined you walking up my steps with our boys in tow, with a redemption card in hand. I know I day-dreamed it, but I wanted to hold that gift as long as possible, especially on those days that walking in front of a semi, moving at ninety miles per hour seemed like a reasonable coping mechanism. The only thing I have left are dreams, and right now, dreams are the only things that take me down hopeful avenues—an engine that never ceases in my head while I sleep.
My dad was a piece of shit who didn’t live by the rules he preached, but he was a smart man, and he said, ‘Desire grows on what it feeds on’.
When you asked me to meet you at McCoy’s, my climate shifted and whispered of possibilities. I have been suffering a crisis of self-esteem recently and my stance is tragically beginning to waiver. Last night I was thinking about my journey and my destination, and I came to the conclusion that my life has been a lesson in losing. I slalomed the past trying to blame some genetic base for my wandering, but to no avail. Then I thought that somewhere along the line I had missed something, because I wasn’t brought up in some weird religion, that would haunt me in my prime in some final melodramatic showdown between good and evil, but I quickly blew that shit off.
I spent hours trying to link us proudly and durably together, and I realized that people like me weren’t meant to have Unicorns, that some higher being had dangled it from a line to keep me moving forward, to make the necessary changes required to evolve into something other than a dumb Hillbilly stump-jumper with a penchant for violence. Is it possible to wish for something that we already had and lost? Is there some Karmic law that disavows those wishes because we didn’t do what we were supposed to with them when we had them?
I’m not going to apologize anymore, Nicki, for striking blows along the fault lines of your heart; attacking my narrow-mindedness and selfishness—what’s the point? You’ve already decided what the future holds for you, and I hope that I’m part of it.
Everything I ever wanted in my life was centered in and around you, but sometimes we don’t know how valuable something is until we let it slip between our fingers, like an ooze we can’t hold, because of loopy youthful ambitions or periods of adolescent experimentations, then finally, it’s too late— our faces are devoid of energy and hope, and our steps are narrating our panic because it’s too late to save what can’t be saved, and we are inexplicably crushed by the absence and coldness of our loss; the air around us is dead, and suddenly, we’re filled with the feeling of being far from everything, that everything inside us has died, as if sprinting against the inevitable drift of the tide. How else can one explain this man’s boorish and irresponsible behavior while in the possession of something priceless that’s not supposed to exists: The fabled Unicorn.
Nicki paused for a moment, looked outside her window, at a passing staggering man with a long beard, and wiped a single tear. Her veneer seemed to be wavering. She leaned against the door and continued.
When someone you have always loved walks away, then suddenly comes back, you are given the gift of a second chance, ‘so you think’, so you look for the right words, the right actions, anything that will keep them around a little longer, long enough to convince them that the person who dished out all that pain had long ceased to exists, and you hope that the weight of what happened in the past was a distant memory, but you understand if the weight is still too heavy to carry, so what do you do? What do I do, Nicki? What the Hell do you want me to do? If for just a second you could be honest with yourself, you’d step back and watch; see and analyze the things spinning around you with your heart.
I see the way you look at me when we’re close. The same way you looked at me in high school— twirling your hair with your finger, those green eyes ablaze, smiling, if eyes could smile, waiting for the moment when no one is around so you can put your lips on mine, at a time in our life when just smelling your hair was enough to give me the shivers.
Only you can stop my bleeding, Nicki. Do you realize that it takes everything inside me not to reach over and feel the softness of your skin when you’re sitting next to me, knowing how it makes me feel inside when I have you in my arms? Do you know how bad I want to taste your lips?
What are you trying to accomplish by making me wait? How many more times can I be close to you and not jump over and take you in my arms. My eyes and head hurt when I look at you knowing I can’t touch you.
Your presence the last few weeks, is a pleasant reminder that hope still lives inside me, that the living can still turn their lives around; that I’m not bound by my past. That if you are willing, we can start anew, all you have to do is move forward and trust that God, and yes, I believe, I found him ten years ago when you left, has a plan greater than the sorrow that’s been keeping me company, that certain people were meant to be in your life, and moving forward, you don’t need to explain the beauty in your heart to them, you can’t keep it from them if you wanted to. That life is a roller-coaster sprinkled with moments when you can touch the stars. Nicki, sorry, but you can’t escape the fundamental principles of your existence. If you don’t believe me, look at the last ten years, when you were too far away to reach me, and the distance felt irrevocable, a chasm that kept me from touching you, or feeling the drum of your heartbeat. Then think about tomorrow without me. You can make me wait if you want, and I’ll wait, but every day without you, without me, will serve to validate the existence of a master plan for the two of us, and keep me from the most important strut in the framework of my existence—my family. If you think the distance between us can shield your feelings for me, think again. I dated six or seven women the last ten years, and I tried to look at every one of them as if they were you—wishing they were, but all of them left an empty hole in my chest. I know you feel the same way, and I firmly believe that our partnership wasn’t accidental— this madness started the moment we met. Why didn’t you remarry, Nicki? What, you couldn’t find Mr. Right in the last ten years? How could a prize like you lay unclaimed for so long?
I want to stop feeling like I’m chasing a fallen star. I can look at it, I can love it, I can wish on it, but I’m starting to feel like I’m never going to catch it. Every time I hear
a country song, it’s painful, like reliving the day you left.
The day we met again, at McCoy’s, after ten years, I got goosebumps when I saw you, and by the end of the night you had siphoned all the energy from inside me and spirited away my hope. That night, sitting in my car, we looked at each other in the fading light of the overhead light, then you stepped out of my car and made that long walk to Karen’s house; that’s the night, Nicki, when you relive it in your head, is the moment you said goodbye without saying goodbye, even if you didn’t know it yet. I saw it in your eyes, and I am dumbfounded trying to figure out why you are fighting what I know you want.
Nicki stopped reading and covered her mouth. Her torso was oscillating, as she shooed away the inebriated man who was tapping on her window, dislodging her mind out of the delicate point in time, then she continued to read, like the pages were a block of ice, fearing the pages would melt before she got to the end.
Sometimes I feel that I’m on an island surrounded by memories and nothing else. Do you remember The Wild Hog Jamboree in Lewisburg, where you got stuck in the mud because Trent’s truck didn’t have four-wheel drive? (You didn’t even know what four-wheel drive was). So you begged me and my good ole’ boy, Clyde Dunleaf to pull you out, and we said we would if you and Sissy flashed us your headlights, and you did, and that sight changed me forever. I went home and I couldn’t get that vision out of my head. The following Monday I asked you out, and that Friday, right before Trent got home, we talked about high school and the normal things, then you put my hand on your breast, over your shirt, and I cupped it gently, pinching your rigid nipples between my fingers, and you kissed me gently. You tasted like Apple Pie on a cool autumn day— a kiss more filled with raw need than romantic welcome, just enough to tease, then you pulled back, as if to say, this is what you have to lose if you screw-up— ‘Ouch’. I thought about the taste of your lips and the smell of your hair all night, but the feel of your breast kept me company until the day we consummated our love on Karen’s counter the following Friday, a day that will live in infamy. You were more surprised than I was when we fell hard for each other because we had known each other since sixth grade, and your sudden appearance at the Jamboree quickly nudged my life into the fantastical.
But that was only the superficial stuff, the stuff that made you attractive to everyone else. What I remember the most about being married to you, besides the fun things we did, were the things that made you beautiful inside; defined you as a beautiful human being. There is nothing more precious than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others—a beauty no picture can express. The kind of beauty that captivates the heart. I have a thousand memories locked in my head, but none comes close to that cool spring weekend we spent at Raven’s Peak, when Karen thought you were slumming at the Calhoun’s, and not because there was something magical happening those two nights when we made whoopee under the stars. That Saturday night, right before I took you home, after the best two days of my life, we sat in my truck, the last flicker of light sinking in the wells of the mountains as twilight ripened into darkness, and we explained away sad country songs, one of the few weekends we weren’t washed away on liquor, and after a while, you turned the music off. We could hear the crickets and tree frogs starting their night song in the small, wooded area behind us. Parked next to the river, the river whispering in our ears, we laid on the hood of my truck and we turned our eyes from the great floating moon, the great bowl of stars, the sound of crickets swelling, and the moonlight cold came in a breath of fragrance to our faces, and in the distance, a sound of a lonely yapping coyote broke the spell between us— a faint smell of lilac filled the air, right before I turned on ‘You’re The Best Break This Old Heart Ever Had’ on my cassette player, and we shared the headsets. I stared into your eyes and they flashed like all the stars that were out that night. I knew something extraordinary was happening inside my ribcage, something I couldn’t explain, and nothing to do with sex, though It pained me inside when I lost contact with your skin for even a second— when you were too far to touch. I looked at you seriously, my eyes at a low burn, and my hands started off shy, with a gentle touch, to see if you were real. I wanted you to take the tenderness and let yourself be swept away in whatever was also washing over me. You tucked your hair behind your ear, and you said ‘I DO’, then you kissed me—
A kiss lit with five-thousand watts of something I couldn’t begin to describe, something I could feel, something I could taste, but like a wind that’s traveled for millennia, or a music that never dies, something I couldn’t see. Who would have guessed that that night would become the genesis of our demise, that twilight would be supporting our last sunsets together? A headline that would leave a clot in my head; remain on the periphery of our lives.
The next morning I took you home and Karen grounded you for a week, not because you spent the weekend with me, she thought you were at the Altman’s, because Karen found out from the Clinton’s that the Altman’s were Jewish, and we know how Karen feels about Jewish people.
There is no shortage of external inspiration when I, when people, look at you. Open your eyes and look, you'll be dazzled by it, just like I am. I hate myself for failing to see the magic, wonder, and potential that resides inside you. Real beauty, the interesting, truly pleasing kind.
I can close my eyes, take a deep breath and see without seeing what Nature’s been creating for thirty-some—odd years. With my eyes closed I see beauty that takes my breath away, like a hundred contiguous crimson sunsets. That’s how beautiful you are—like hundreds of sunsets, like millions of fireflies on a calm warm night lighting the sky. Something that has given me pause and many nights of regret. Now I can easily see the Universe inside your eyes.
For years I wanted to know if you were meant to be in my future because time didn’t heal what was broken, so I removed all the worldly things about you from my mind. I Didn’t think about your looks, our intimate moments, or your personality. I thought about how you made me feel, how you tried to improve my life, and the virtues you possessed that pushed me to want to become better. I removed all the shine from your façade, hoping it would make it easier to move on, and what I was left with were just the things beneath your surface, and without a doubt, I came full circle, and now, more than ever, I want to finish my story with you because you are so much more beautiful on the inside than even I recognized when we married, something I could have easily seen, had I bothered to look.
So many great times, Nicki. Those days, those moments made it possible for me to keep my momentum, my balance. Even you can’t deny that those experiences bound us to each other, and just as often, the shame of my powerlessness to change, earlier, haunted me. For years I couldn’t even look in a mirror because what I saw appalled me. Do you remember how you got pregnant with Tyler? I was low on cash, so I went to Wal-Mart and bought Wal-Mart specials and Tyler was the result of my frugality.
Nicki put the paper down next to her, and it was difficult to ascertain whether she was crying or laughing, but the tears were a testament to her emotional predicament. Then it came, the faucet in her eyes opened wide. She covered her face and dropped her head to the steering wheel. A few twinkles in time passed and she put her finger between her teeth and stared at a couple as they walked from their car to the convenience store. She regained her posture and continued, but something had changed in her demeanor. The stolid confident woman that first opened that letter, was in the throes of something she couldn’t control.
I’ll be here with the boys if you need anything. If I don’t see you anytime soon, I will see you in my dreams, where I no longer suffer that drowning, helpless sensation, as I glimpse that beautiful face, panic no longer scissoring through me. Someone told me that if you no longer like the things you remember, then get out there and remember new things—better things, with better people. People that can impact your life and change your outlook. You better hold on tight, honey, because this rodeo is just getting sta
rted. By the way, I learned how to dance, and with any luck, the Gala will be less memorable than our Senior Prom.
Please go with me, my Beautiful wife.
See you soon.
Love Kyle-
P.S. The day we almost got in that brawl at The Fire Creek Saloon, you asked me what day I relived the most in my head the last ten years, and I told you it was the day you left. But you didn’t ask me what the second day was that I relived the most, what day meant the most to me, so now I’m telling you. It was the day you said, ‘I DO’. Give me a chance to finish our Fairy Tale with a happy ending. Nicki, I know when you look in my eyes now, what you see is something built by an unquenchable love that can’t be measured, and as much as I love you, I can never love you as much as I have missed you.
Those words were like a trigger for Nicki, because she lost it. She dropped the tear-soaked letter on the dash and covered her face, clearly torn. She didn’t cry audibly, she used her index fingers to clear the corners of her eyes, then dropped her head on the steering wheel on top of her hands. A moment later, Nicki stared through the windshield for a few minutes, wiping her red swollen eyes, and when she felt she could move forward again, she took the five pieces of paper and folded them gently. She reached over to the glovebox, opened it and watched as the owners’ manual fell to the carpeted floor of the Jeep, landing on the pages, fanned out on the floor. She picked up the substantial trade manual, closed it and stuffed it back in the overly full glovebox. Under the manual, on the passenger floor, she saw a plastic vertical I.D badge with a metal clip. Stuffed inside the plastic sleeve, wasn’t Kyle’s university identification, but a picture of Kyle and Nicki on their wedding day that had been placed between the pages of the manual, hastily. Nicki picked it up and inspected it closely. The picture was severely sun-faded, evidenced by the yellowing of the photograph, the brown edges, and the cracking of the vinyl sleeve. Kyle was wearing a gray, polyester, fitted, western Rockabilly suit, complimented by a black western Colonel tie. His face had a handsome stubble; his hair in a heartthrob mane. The only thing that had changed over the last ten years, since their wedding, was his hair doo (much shorter now), and Kyle’s torso was thicker, in a brawny way, and he still carried a thin waist from high school— his thumbprint. Kyle’s handsomeness could not be over-emphasized, but still, if it wasn’t for his sheer size, he would have drifted into background noise because of Nicki’s sheer simple and alluring exquisiteness. In the photo, in spite of the fading of the image, Nicki’s green eyes couldn’t be overlooked, the focal point of a photo that even exposure to sunlight, and time, was impotent to fade her radiance. Nicki was wearing a white lace, Deep-V-neck body-con dress. Her gorgeous, natural, smooth face devoid of make-up, highlighted her Raven-black hair, side-swept in a Bohemian dew, topped off with a three-layer white/Ivory heart-shaped beaded veil. In the photo, the crystal drop-down earrings still held their shimmer, even after all these years. But her trademark heart-stopping ass and Mamma Mia legs, kept the eyes moving right down, pass the hem of a very short dress.