“Think about the people missing from your life, and how you feel about them. What we remember — and what we forget — may reveal more about ourselves than about them. We have photos, letters, souvenirs, and fragments of memory, but our powerful imagination takes over from there: We color in the blanks. And that’s OK. Retouching old loves is a way of understanding what we want. It helps us find our way to new ones.
“It’s impossible to know whether the experiences below are about infatuation, true love, lust, or something else entirely. But we can be sure that each of these contributors learned about life and themselves in the process.”
fading nostalgia
My left thigh is dotted with little scabs from when Babycat would sit on my lap and something would scare him, sending him leaping off my legs, taking tiny pieces of my skin with him.
I miss New York. I miss my friends there.
Uh, by friends, I don’t just mean the cats. It is kind of sad that I feel I have to clarify, though, heh.
or kinda like one of those Popples toys
We were still in bed on Easter Sunday morning, legs entangled, both of us with morning breath. (At this point in our relationship, it doesn’t really bother us.) I am asking him if he had any favorite memories from Easter as a little kid. He tells me it was when the Top Gun soundtrack on CD appeared in his Easter basket. He would blast the album on his crappy stereo while riding around on his bike. He thinks he was about twelve years old.
The timing of the receipt of this particular CD makes sense, considering it was the early nineties, though the album came out in 1986. But if you have ever listened to the whole thing, you would be aware that “Danger Zone’’ and “Take My Breath Away” are not the only cheesy gems on the soundtrack. There are quite a few obscure tracks on this thing, and thinking of a little Jeremy rocking out to it brings a smile to my face. (A few years ago, one of my friends burnt a copy of it on CD as a late engagement gift, since Jeremy has no idea where his copy went. Thanks, John!)
So Jeremy grins like a little kid as he goes on about past Easters, telling me what kind of dye they would use on the eggs, and how he would draw lines and dots and squiggles on the shells. He tells me about the shrink wrap things that were used on the eggs as decorations, but I’m not familiar with them. I start kissing his face as he tells me these other memories. He kisses me back, too—lots of little kisses, not like making out or anything—and then he stops the storytelling and laughs, asking, “Hey, what are you doing?”
“Just brushing some stuff off your skin; keep talking!”
“Well, what stuff?”
“The usual. A cat hair, an eyelash—”
“—a Matchbox car? Some green army men? A cow?!” (We are both laughing really hard now.) “An Easter cow! I’m a katamari!”
