Then I Woke Up

Summer Love - the Quarantine Edition

“Then I Woke Up” by Mary Corbin

I could never have seen it coming if you had asked me two months ago but I fell in love this summer. Who doesn’t fall in love in summer, right? But this was no ordinary summer and this was certainly no ordinary love. This was my love from the summer of 1980. Come back to find me.

With so much sitting around not going places, one does get a little restless to say the least and you sit on the couch reading your Facebook scroll and your Insty page and all levels of crazy that comes through the news pipelines and you just start thinking over your life. People reconnect. They do, in this kind of unpredictable climate. For all kinds of reasons. To reconcile differences, find common ground, have a good laugh, compare coping mechanisms, to cling to life. And just plain boredom. Listen, Zoom can do wonders to a lonely heart. 

One morning, another quarantine morning, I woke up. And I found an email in my inbox from Marvin. Marvin Macks. Marvelous Marvin Macks. He was my first true love when I was just 19 years old back in Chicago. Marvin and I fell in love over potato skins and half-and-half's and in case you didn’t know, a half-and-half is a pint glass filled halfway with tap beer and half Guinness Stout. We met through a mutual friend and it was love at first sight. No really it was. We were both damn cute and he was a college soccer star with great teeth and a hot bod and lots of room to party and have a good time. Pretty soon we moved in together and we just couldn’t get enough of each other, I mean, we were connected at the hip.

At one point, though, in our relationship we decided we needed to branch back out with our own friends once in a while, not forget those people altogether so we experimented with him going off on a boys camping trip or me going out with the girls for ladies night somewhere. We were working at keeping things open for each other, not getting in each other’s way of a broader scope of relationships and experiences without each other. There was only that one time that it sort of pissed me off when I was invited to go on a weekend road trip to visit some friends in college at Mizzou - that’s in Columbia, Missouri, in case you didn’t know. Anyway, it was some big football game and my friends were practically begging me to go saying “everyone is going, it’s gonna be a big party weekend, you’ve GOT to go”. So I said yes. Well, I ran it by Marvin first and he said yeah, sure, I should do it. Go have fun with my friends. 

What I didn’t know and didn’t learn until I came back from my weekend was that Marvin had just been given two free tickets an hour before to see the Boss, that’s Bruce Springsteen, in case you didn’t know, but, really, I mean do you really not know that? So, Marvin hadn’t had a chance to tell me yet and he decided right then and there not to tell me he just scored those amazing tickets for Saturday night because we had made that pact, that silly little pact, that we weren’t going to stand in each other’s way to doing things with other people. He had two ninth row tickets to see the Boss, for god’s sakes, how could he think he couldn’t violate the pact just that one time!

Other than that one tarnish on our sterling trophy, we really had a wonderful relationship. For two young kids who didn’t know much about love, we were perfecting something together. But we only lasted for two years because he went off to grad school and I went backpacking around Europe with my friend Lori and you know what they say about long distance relationships. That silly phrase about absence isn’t true, don’t believe it for a second. The heart doesn’t grow fonder, it wanders. So we drifted off into our own lives on opposite coasts as I landed back in the States in California with a surfer from Seal Beach who I met at a youth hostel in Italy and that was that. 

Marvin and I kept in touch for a few years after that, sharing stories about boyfriends and girlfriends and marriages and dogs and vacations and kids, he with three and me with two, but then you know, life just is. Parents pass away, careers change, your kids have milestone events and the letters and phone calls get farther and fewer between. Then I woke up. I woke up one otherwise banal morning making coffee and toast, one more day in lock-down avoiding the news and people on the street, to find an email in my inbox from Marvin. “Hey, how are you!” it said in the subject line. What other Marvin could it have been but my Marvin, right, other than the fact that he started every conversation with “Hey” and also the fact that I never met another Marvin in my whole long life. 

So I opened it. I read through a long tale of happiness and loss, success and failure, joy and sadness. In essence, the threads that made up the fabric of his life. Any life, really, when you think about it. It was an entertaining read, he was a good writer. At the end of it was his phone number saying I could call anytime if I was so inclined. Well, was I? I mean it had been thirty years since we were last in touch, what could we possibly have to say to each other? Is the bond still there, I mean, does something like that, someone like that stay forever or simply disappear through the revolving door of people who shape your life? I didn’t know the answer to that question at all. I did know that I felt something weird in my stomach when I thought about him and I don’t mean just now when I think about him but all these years...whenever. I thought. about. him. 

I left that email in my box for a few days, thought it all over and finally responded saying “Yes, let’s talk soon!” in a vague, non-committal, no date or time specified kind of way. But then he called me on it as he would always do and proposed a more exact day and time to talk on the phone or Zoom, if I preferred. Oh, god no, I’m not ready for Zoom with Marvin but a phone call would be fine. So it was settled and I tried not to think about it too much.

Then I woke up and it was the day of our call though I would have to wait all day until 3:00 for it to happen. You can imagine the nerves and the questions and the lists and the doubts and the genuine excitement that built up until that hour crept slowly closer and closer. Then it was three and I’ll be darned if Marvin didn’t call me at exactly 3:00 as if he was on a timer or something which would be just like him. I picked up and said hello with a slight question in my voice. “Hey” he said nonchalantly. “Hey,” I said back. And from that moment it just flowed. Like we had just seen each other yesterday. Well, it was just yesterday if you put it in the proper context of a whole continuum of space and time, right? People don’t change that much I don’t think and time is just a relative, abstract construct of our minds if you ask me.

Marvin was so eager and excited and downright giddy about our reconnection, saying things like, “You’re so good for my brain!” and repeatedly telling me how happy he was. He wanted to talk every week and wanted to know if it was ok with me that he “plans to stay connected with me from now on”. I was happy too. I admit it. During our first conversation on the phone we agreed we had had something special, that we had a bond, that we raised the bar for every relationship that followed. He loved talking about how respectful we were with each other and how we never got in each other’s way. Except for the concert, of course, it was a pretty perfect union. Marvin also told me he was divorced.

Then I woke up a couple months into our revived friendship to a voicemail from Marvin from the night before, wherein, after a few scotches he tells me he never should have married his first wife, that he should have married me, “...despite my three great kids with her…”, should have quit with the not getting in each other’s way bit and that it was me all along and that he’s been talking to his therapist for years about me. Then he sort of trailed off into an awkward silence and a “well, that’s all I needed to say….for now. Ok, talk soon?” 

Me? I’m still married. Had I told him that yet? I’m pretty darn happily married, too, but you know, it’s been a long time together whatever with one person. You know how it goes. But what do you do with a voicemail like that? Ignore it? Cut things off? Talk about it, laugh about it together? It was starting to feel like I was cheating on my husband, getting deeper into a forbidden tryst that would cross a line with no turning back, that I would regret for years to come. I talked to my sister about it, “What exactly are you doing?” she asked me. How the hell did I know. Yeah, it was much more innocent than the way I just mapped out, there was no indiscretion. But it had all the markings of a classic summer romance. Those stomach flutters in anticipation of the call, the giggly laughter sharing stories, shared points of view, the visions in my head of the plans we made to see each other.

But, let’s face it. It’s Covid Summer and who knows when Marvin and I will actually see each other in person, when and where and how, and maybe even why, that’s all just speculation and pipe dreaming for now. We’re all in quarantine. Letting our minds run wild with desire and fantasy and hopes and dreams for a better future where we hug and kiss old friends, have grand summer reunions and sit under the trees with wine and cheese. But worse, maybe, we see the past as some perfect world where a boyfriend was a one truly heroic, perfected love that can never be matched. That is worthy of rekindling and creating a new spark better than the last. A place where the sun shines brilliant everyday and we frolic in unending love and joy.

Then I woke up. This morning, I woke up. On my Facebook feed was a post from my friend Jen in Asheville, North Carolina, one of those memes that people pass around. It said, “Don’t let a pandemic be the reason you get in touch with your ex.”