Sixteen each, we met at the YMCA dance and I trembled when I got the courage to ask you for a dance. I remember the band played Sixteen Candles. You honest to God felt like an angel in my arms, your beautiful blonde hair heavenly, your sky blue eyes, divine. I think I fell in love with you the moment you were In my arms; it all felt so natural, so true, so incredibly real, like nothing I’d ever experienced.
It was so many years, so many summers ago, I can’t remember who said I love you first. I only remember I meant it forever. I remember I loved you so much I would have died for you without hesitation, without reservation.
And oh my God those kisses on the banks of the pond, the pond waters caressing the shore, my head in you lap looking up at your sunlit angelic face, captivated by your smile and how beautiful you looked, how intoxicatingly sweet your perfume was when I inhaled it with my every breath, and the soft summer green grass like a love nest enveloping us in romantic bliss and how when summer was over it was so hard, so painful to be apart from you, sweet you.
I remembered how we planned to get married when we graduated from high school, and how your heart was so true. And how even though you lived faraway in New Jersey and I lived in Massachusetts you spent your summers in Woburn the city I lived In, and how I went to your prom in Montclair, New Jersey before the summer love faded into a dark frozen winter when all the summer flowers and our love wilted and died. And how I cried and cried and cried.
And you broke what I thought was our forever vow when you cheated on me with some guy going to Rutgers U., and I remember how I never knew I had a heart that could be shattered into a million pieces that would take years to put back together, misspent years of dissipation and dissolution
not caring if I lived or died, such was the agony of the fairy tale evermore love lost.
It was even more painful because I stayed true to you beyond the distance, beyond the seasons, and I would have stayed true to you eternally. Even now decades hence and me like a monk in the world, sometimes I still think of what might have been, what could have been.
But alas we’re not sixteen anymore and Sixteen Candles was so long ago, and you might be dead and I almost was, and if we were to meet again, maybe I’d wake up and see it was only like a dream, and that teenage summer love was never meant to be, and I’d dry my older, wiser eyes.
Bob Boyd