The Girl I Once Knew

When I was young, I lived in the biggest house on the smallest block of an even smaller neighbourhood. It was a fairly dull place. Not even rain wanted to fall there. There was never really much to do or see, that is, until the day the girl with the red hair moved in across the street. 

The first time I saw her, I thought I was dreaming. And then she hit me in the back of the head with a tennis ball and I realized that I was completely conscious. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen with her glossy green eyes and her millions of freckles. It was at that moment when I realized that I just had to know her.

From that day on, we were inseparable. I watched her catch her first fish down at the quarry and she cried when I told her I would later cook it for supper. She made me throw it back, of course, but it made me love her even more because while I saw the fish as nothing but a tasty meal, she saw a life. We were together all throughout high school and I would have never even thought of another girl when I was with her. I watched her make the moon laugh and the sun cry. Her ability to move anything and everything around her was something I would always envy, but never understand. She saw life in a way that my eyes had never even known. She barely lived in the same world as I did but we were always in each other’s atmospheres. She could always tell what I was thinking but I could never even know if her smile was a real or a fake one. We used to ride our bikes all the way down to the pier and then we would sit back and look up at the stars. Well, I would look at them but she, she would talk to them and I swear when she did, they talked back. She told me about the future but it was always more than vague. All I knew was that she was going to be something and I was going to be something right beside her. Everyone told us we were too young for love but what did they know that we didn’t? All I knew was that when I flash forward ahead of time, whether it is ten years or twenty years or seventy years, she was always there with me. 

The day of our high school graduation, she told me she was leaving. I hadn’t known at the time where she was leaving to, but I knew that wherever it was, she needed to be there. The rest of us were all set off to our waiting lives as mechanics or school teachers or perhaps news paper boys but not her. She had big plans, we just never knew what they were. 

The night before she left, I took her to the train station and she told me she would see me again one day but I didn’t hold my breath.

After that night, I didn’t hear from her. Three and a half years went by and she stopped sending letters back and I stopped writing them. I decided that I couldn’t spend my life waiting for someone who lived in a different world. I couldn’t waste away here, knowing that I was the only person in this world. 

It wasn’t until the day before my wedding, when I finally saw her. It was like I was seeing her for the first time all over again. It was like I was dreaming but this time, I didn’t want to wake up. She told me she had heard through the grapevine that I was engaged and that she wouldn’t have missed it for the world but I knew that her world was different to mine. We spent that whole day together. I took her down to the little coffee shop at the end of the road because she always loved the peach scones from there. We went down to the quarry and this time, I threw the fish back without her telling me too. That night, we went to our spot at the pier where we used to go as kids and I asked her why she left me all those years ago. She told me she loved me but she just loved life a little bit more. When I asked her why she bothered coming back if she was just going to leave again she said "Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.” And then she left me again and it hurt even more than it did the first time because something inside told me I wouldn’t be seeing her again for a long long time. And that feeling was right.

 Last I heard she was down in Portland working in a cafe, with a baby boy and no husband. I always wondered if she would become the something that I always knew she could be but then I received a note to her funeral eleven years later and all the memories of my first love came to mind. By that time, I was already married with two beautiful children and had mostly forgotten about the girl I once knew. I wondered what life would be like if she had never left though. If our roots had grown to become so tangled that she had stayed here and loved me and we had grown old together like she said we would. 

I went alone to her funeral and said few words to anyone there. I don’t think I could have. After the service, once everyone had left, I stayed. I stayed and I spoke to her and I told her everything I was too afraid to tell her then she was alive. Before I left, I turned to where she would now be and I said to her "Our roots will always be tangled.”