I fell head over heels in love for the first time when I was 18, a freshman in college. She was a woman beyond me — too smart and too beautiful and too funny. I knew how to talk to her but I didn’t know how to court her. At 18 I just wasn’t man enough for it. She knew how I felt about her, though I never told her, and I think she was touched by my feelings and by my bewilderment.
One night during a drunken party at our freshman dorm I was out in its courtyard and saw her sitting in the window of my room. I climbed up to the window and she pulled me into her arms and into a kiss, a long and passionate kiss.
The next day she acted as though it hadn’t happened, and so did I. I couldn’t relate the moment we’d shared to the real world, couldn’t climb up to that window again. I think I believed — and undoubtedly I was right at that stage of my wayward progress into manhood — that one kiss was all I deserved from such a woman. We stayed distant friends.
Two years later she was killed in a car crash, at the age of twenty. The memory of that kiss, frozen forever in time, remains the greatest romantic moment of my life, and a kind of honor that I still feel I need to live up to. My feelings for her and my bewilderment abide — 46 years on they’ve never changed, not even a little bit.
Wow. Was that real life, or a dream you had after an evening of Balanchine ballets?
A real memory, made vivid after a night of listening to late Dylan. He’s the only one who writes about such stuff.
Music has such an ability to recall powerful emotions. It’s both a blessing and a curse. To play certain pieces of Beethoven can bring back events from decades ago for me. Great post. Sorry for your loss.
Not so much much my loss as the world’s. She was an amazing woman. She’d be 64 now — I can’t even imagine the life she’d be looking back on if she’d lived.
Music really does stitch our lives into a kind of unity — the unity of a patchwork quilt, perhaps, but still a unity.
I heard some kid say the other “I loved her so much I thought I’d die from it.” I too have had this experience, and your right, it stays with you for life.
And such memories somehow grow more vivid the more one ages.