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By Unchained Date: 2001 Aug 08 Comment on this Work [[2001.08.08.13.54.12595]] |
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She walked in and sat down at my table and my heart stopped. Thirty one years hadn't changed those eyes or the smile I remembered. We were older, but I would have known her anywhere. It could have been yesterday to me. I remember her standing in that bus line like a doe among cattle and watching the eyes of the boys stray over to look her up and down. They were too shy to say anything to her directly, but they did have some dirty remarks they only spoke in whispers. That was the start of it. One hot afternoon on the bus with the exhaust fumes making us all ill and drowsey and one of the boys let his foul mouth run. He was sitting right behind her, talking about her, and my buddy saw the crimson blush creep over her. He cautioned the guy to drop it, that I might overhear. Everyone close to me knew how I felt about her. That didn't matter to the brilliant Mr. Foulmouth. It only made him worse. My buddy got off the bus behind her, and so she never saw Mr. Foulmouth and his friends jump him. I stepped off the bus into a war zone. "There he is!", Mr. Foulmouth yelled. My friend was black and blue from the punches of five pair of fists. He jerked himself free and ran to me gasping out the details as the gang advanced. Something in me turned cold. I glanced back to see her going over the hill towards home. Good. She wouldn't have to see me get killed. They closed ranks like an advancing tide, and the surf broke in a foam of fists. She told me all this. She told me how it had been told for weeks behind my back. I had gone down in a swarm of punches and kicks that bruised me for a month. I had gone down hard with the force of their attack. She told me all this. Then she told me how I had risen from that mob like some bloody ghost with fresh anger grinning wickedly on my beaten face, and how one by one each of my attackers were beaten down, or ran only to be caught. Finally there was only me and the onlookers who had stayed to watch. She told me she had known all these years, and that in her worst moments in life she remembered that day. She remembered that there was always one person in her life who respected and cared for her even when she had lost all hope for herself. She never said she loved me. She'd never have to. Someone someplace understands that statement. Her life and mine are two seperate paths that may never cross again in the next thirty one years, and probably won't. Life has a way of doing those things to us, and we have to accept them and go on. The main thing is that she knows. Good or bad, wrong or right, no matter what passes in our lives, she will always remember that there is one person who still believes in her and thinks the best of her where ever she goes. I know she feels the same for me. No neeed for either of us to say it. She walked out into the sunshine that afternoon and into memory again. I don't know what became of her, and maybe never will. But she knows. See you around, Sherri. |