Indelible
I was seventeen, had one year left of high school and a boyfriend I didn't even love. It was the end of summer, and I was on the verge of a night indelible
because it was incredible for me.
If "tall, dark, and handsome" had a face, it belonged to one who walked
into the store I worked at nightly all alone. He brought with him a smile just for me -
beautiful, magical, seducing. Were he music, he'd have been the warmest song
to ever touch my soul. Perhaps it was the moon, lunacy-inducing, that made me crave
his visits more and more, for he'd come each night into the store,
his ritual to tease me with his glances; then stand in line with just one purchase,
engaging me with words deliciously belying that he spoke my native tongue.
Did he know I fairly worshiped him?
And where was Aphrodite to let her dear Adonis wander free?
I learned eventually he was staying with a brother and soon would be returning to Quebec. I do not know, but I can now infer the moon waxed full by the time he asked me out, for I had waxed complete in my audacity. Knowing it was his last night in town, I closed the store up early and fled with my Prince Charming.
The stuff of poetry that night transpired. . .fodder for the several poems of romance I've since penned.
Sitting in his car in front of my own house, late at night, into the early morning. . .
The way he gazed into my eyes, teaching me of butterfly kisses and his breathing his sweet breath along my ear lobes, the way our fingers interlaced, the way he caressed the small of my back. . . He taught me how small things can be just as sensuous as that act of love that virgins do not know, and he branded me with a yearning for a sweet romantic love I'd never felt so strongly, nor would I ever know again as wonderfully as I was shown that night, for others in my life I've kissed, yet I have never missed them.
My dream love wrote me postcards from Quebec. Then it all died out.
I married. A few years passed; then I got a call from him, completely unexpected!
Somehow he'd tracked me down to my new home. I took the call, as I held my firstborn baby daughter in one arm. Heart in my throat, I told him it was nice to hear from him, but I was married now. So though I'll never know what "may have been," I'm still left with the memory I chose to make with him that one day of my life, my very best, because for just one night, I was Cinderella. A prince still holds my slipper, and infinite romance lives on inside my poems.
For Frank Herrera's First Love Poetry Contest
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