"I paint myself because I am alone so much. I am the person I know best." — Frida Kahlo
Last night I had tea with Alex, my very first boyfriend. When I was fourteen I thought we were going to get married. We haven’t seen each other since high school graduation. He’s been living in Prague for two years and is now bumming around New York for a couple of days, trying to figure out how to get his writing career off the ground. He has a slight Eastern European accent- I cannot tell if it’s real or an affectation. His hair is longer than mine. He once called my writing trite, and I still sting from it. Now he wants me to help him with his writing.
The fourteen-year-old me wanted to say, "You never believed in me. Now, I’m not going to believe in you."
The twenty-four-year-old me said, "Send me some of your stuff, and I’ll see what I can do."
We talked about people we had and hadn’t kept in touch with, about the chemical plant fire near Raleigh, about college, about the sex we’d never had. We talked about our families. When I told him about my father almost dying, he said “Was it from a car?”
“Yes,” I replied, surprised. “How did you know?”
"I always thought it would be a car," he said.
It’s odd how people go from knowing you innately to not knowing you at all. It’s odd how people can not have known you for a long time and still understand you.
The fourteen-year-old me wanted to be a writer.
The twenty-four-year-old me, one little piece at a time, is becoming one.
I won’t make the easy joke about how seeing Alex yesterday was like talking to the dead. I’ll say instead that it was like finding a favorite sweater that I thought I’d lost years ago. In a way, it still fits.
