To a boy I used to know

Quite by chance yesterday (or maybe through a Google search, but I'm not saying), I came upon the e-mail address of my old high school flame. My first love. The boy I really and truly believed I would marry. Before I knew what I was doing, I had sent a short message hurtling through cyberspace, heading straight towards his inbox. Instantly I felt this strange sense of remorse ("What the...?! Now why the heck did I just do that?"), but I have to say that it was mingled with just the teeniest bit of intrigue, too. Will he remember me? Will he write back? OHMYGOSH...will he see my blog?! (I remembered too late that I have a link to my blog attached to my automatic e-signature.) And don't worry: it's not like this was a big secret or anything. I told Darren what I'd done right away, and he laughed at me! But what on earth made me do such a thing?

I can tell you: it's all this driving back and forth to the hospital that I've been doing lately. Amidst these crazy days, my commutes there and back are the only interludes (however brief) in which I can hear myself think...so of course I drown out my thoughts with music, blasting me right back to my past. Seriously. It's uncanny, the way that every single night there is at least one song that reminds me so intensely of that one magical summer between my junior and senior years of high school. Mr. Jones. Hey Jealousy. (And more, but those are the two that stand out most.)

And suddenly, as I'm singing along at the top of my lungs, I'm feeling my age. Wasn't I just seventeen, like, yesterday? When did this become my life? When did I become a thirty year old, married for almost ten years, mother to four? With a mortgage? And a minivan? I shouldn't be surprised, really, to find myself here; it's where I've always wanted to be. It's just that time, this distance between the me of now and the me of yesteryear, has flown by in what seems to be the blink of an eye. I'll blink again, and my babies will be halfway grown. How can that be? And in how many ways am I squandering this precious time?

I'm not really expecting him to write back. He's married now, too, or was the last I heard. I'm sure his own life has taken many unexpected turns, for better or for worse. But if he does happen to find me here, in my own little corner of cyberspace, I hope he'll smile fondly to remember the girl that I once was. To see the woman I've become. To know that I still think of him with affection. To glimpse, for a moment, the fleeting bit of time in which the world was ours for the taking.

How I would love to hear from him again.