Thinking.....

Today I had lunch with my first love and my husband. Oooo sticky, you think? Yeah, kinda. It was a little awkward. I'll call my first love Bryce, keeping up with the anonymity of this schtuff. And this really isn't disguising him I guess. Granted, I don't know many that know his middle name lol.

Anyways, like I was saying.... I had lunch with him today. He just recently came back into my life after 15 year on and off again hiatus. I was soooo madly in love with him in high school. He was my first kiss, my first real boyfriend, my first love, my first fondle... He was my first in a lot of things. Well... Not THAT first. Unfortunately. Ever have one of those guys you wish you would have bedded because you're SURE it would have been fabulous? Yeah... That's him... The one that got away... *Insert Katy Perry music here*

I've known him since I was knee high to a grasshopper. For those of you who are not familiar with this vernacular, this means a REALLY REALLY long time... His mom worked with my mom, we lived down the road from each other, went to school with eachother, spent oodles of time with each other and effectively hated each others guts for the longest time.

Until Sophomore year. The year my parents split and my world turned upside down. We moved 10 miles away from my childhood home in Podunk, KS and I went to school in Oshitty, Kansas for a few months. That's when Bryce and I hooked back up. At first it was a cat fight every single time we saw each other. I vaguely remember having him in a headlock in Biology class. *blissful sigh* Oh those were the days when you could pick on someone and they knew you liked them. Now if you pick on someone because you like them they call that battery or harassment. Pfft.

Anyways. We started dating. As much as Sophomores without vehicles could do. He spent Seminar class with me digging earthworms for my earthworm collection... We spent the choir/band trip to Worlds of Fun together and even got a cute little charicture made of us. Wonder if he still has that.... He got me a stuffed Buffalo... Which I still have :)... We finally decided that it would be beneficial on both our parts just to give up the guise of beating each other up and date. It worked. We were THE power couple of the Geek Squad. He was the Gambit to my Rouge... He was wonderful.

Then my mom met this Colonel Sanders wanna be on the internet that was some software guru in Seattle. Her bright idea? Move to Seattle and put down roots there. So... I told him I had to break up with him. Broke my little 16 year old heart. and his... When I found out a month later that we weren't moving to Seattle (turned out Colonel Sanders liked to frequent the M4M Seattle Chat rooms on AOL.... Uhm.... Ew?) I tried to get back together with him. No such luck. He was dating someone else. And once again, my heart was broken.

After that we moved to Springfield and I got to experience what high school SHOULD have been like for me. Not the hell that I went through for the last two years. It was fabulous. Nothing like being the little fish in a really goddamned big pond. After graduation my dad wanted me to come live with him. I said, sure, why not. It'll give me a chance to get away from my overbearing and domineering sister and mother. Just what I wanted.

Got a job at good ole Wallymart and told my dad I'd quit smoking. Who does my best friend Lizard bring in one night? After 3 years of not seeing him.... it was Bryce... Goddamn did he look good?! Pouty lips, a little stubble, beautiful blue eyes. I melted on sight...

We were hot and heavy... And god I was so in love.... We danced in the moonlight to George Strait... He kissed me and told me he loved me and always had... He was just.... Amazing...

And then I lost my job and threatened to throw my evil step sister off the Ferris wheel at Worlds of Fun... For some reason she thought it was a threat... When in all actuality it was a promise. My dad threw me out... I had to go back to Springfield and I had to break a promise to Bryce that I swore I never would...

He wouldn't talk to me after that phone call... I sat outside and bawled, watching him as he drove past my dad's house repeatedly... His old truck was unmistakable even in the darkness... A part of my heart closed up for good that night... He wouldn't even let me explain myself... To him I did the unthinkable... I left him when I said I never would again...

I had been trying for years after that to find out little snippets of information... Along the way I found out he joined the Marines (HOORAH!!)... I was so scared he'd get killed in duty and I'd never know. I wrote tons of letters to him that I never mailed... Cried a million tears that he never knew about...

A few years after I got married to Chucuardo, I found out that he got married as well... to an evil bitch shrew that I was sure would ruin his life *how true that was!*

A year or so after that I found him on either facebook or myspace... Not sure which... He divorced his wife... We talked a few times on the phone, but that was it... It helped for awhile... then he disappeared again...

I kept having these dreams with him in them... Very vivid, very prophetic dreams... In one dream he told me, looked me straight in the eye and told me, that every time I dream of him, that he's thinking of me. I can still hear his voice telling me that all these years past.

I lost track of him again except for sporadic facebook message every now and then... About every time i'd close up the wound, he'd surface again and it'd start festering. So many things that I wanted to say would bubble to the surface and I would never be brave enough to tell him how I feel about him and what I felt that Last Night.

I still feel that way, to this day. I talk to him on the phone, I've seen him twice now in 15 years and every time I See him I want to sit him down and just pour it all out. Husband be damned. I can't help it that I still have feelings for him... But I know they're probably one sided... That there's no way in hell that he could possibly still carry a torch for me like I have carried for him all this time....

I was driving back from a session in Oshitty earlier tonight and I was passing by the neighborhood we grew up in... Looking at the beautiful Victorian painted ladies, thinking to myself... If I would have stayed with him, I'd still be in this god forsaken town.... But I'd be happy... Because I was with him. I'd deal with my overbearing and slightly senile father... I'd deal with my bitch shrew of a British step mother.... Because he'd be there to hold me, to love me, to let me love him....

He's still the slightly geeky, overly awkward boy I fell in love with when I was 9... He still has those beautiful blue eyes and that gorgeously infectious smile that never fails to get me smiling with him.... But alas.. We're on different courses in this life... *sigh*