Half A Couple

The day was bright and I was playing with my army men in the sand dunes of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, in late August, of my eleventh year when we met. She was the teenage daughter of one of my mother's friends and I was instantly smitten. It was my first time being so. Until that moment girls hardly interested me. But she was different. The sun through her hair was burnished a deep yellow and her limbs were lithe and her smile brilliant. Then and there as if in a trance I gave up my plastic soldiers and pretend war games and blundered forward betraying my heart. With winks and nudges the gathered adults made note of my new maturity and my abandonment of toys. Such a big boy they said and my chest ached with the knowledge that I was the object of such scrutiny. Several nights later this golden girl of my first romantic yearnings served as a babysitter for my siblings and I. So struck was I by the prospects of the two of us being together alone upon the bedtime hour of my siblings I pretended sleepiness and went to bed at their bedtime, too. In the safety of my bedroom I stood at my door with my ear pressed against the wood listening as hard as I could to that girl on the other side who I would never in reciprocated passion touch.

When I was fourteen I swooned for a girl named Corrie and I knew an aching that held sway over me with a power that was oppressive and gothic. When she rejected me for another I wept and kept to my bed as a vampire to his coffin. For weeks I grieved and had no taste for life without her. But eventually I had to move on.

Over the next three years I was a dumb animal in regards to relationships. With a grope instead of a caress my attempts at intimacy were more of a wrestling match. Then I met Linda. I was a senior in high school seventeen years old and hanging out at a local bar. We hit it off and she gave me her number. I called her a couple of days later. When she asked me what I felt like doing I told her I felt like going to a motel. She chuckled and said she was game for it. I asked my mother if I could borrow her portable radio and when she asked why I told her because I'm going to a motel with a woman. She was a bit flabbergasted but said Ok. You can borrow it. That night Linda initiated me in the hows of sex and coital satisfaction. We stayed a couple for a few weeks but my age and more to the point my immaturity came between us and pushed us apart.

In my twenties I met Joan. She was a sweet and sensitive girl a couple years younger than me and though by age and definition a woman I thought of her as a girl. I tormented her by driving too fast with only a pinkie on the steering wheel and yelling out lines first uttered by Frank Booth in the movie Blue Velvet. Somehow she was able to put up with me and my limitations. I shared less than equally and remained aloof and dark and brooding. I was in a nutshell a mess and when it came time for me to move to Boston in pursuit of school I parted ways with her.

It was also during this time that I hooked up with Kathy. She was on one of her periodic outs from my band mate, Steve. She and I were carnally one and I experienced in her waterbed exploits and satisfaction worthy of several torrid paragraphs in a Harlequin romance novel.

I did not have another relationship until midway into my thirties. Her name was Laura and she drank more than I was comfortable with. I knew this even before I wooed her. Loneliness is a serpent with an apple. And I bit into that fruit. We shared a rocky year together. Me with only one foot in. I led her on not brave enough to face reality that we weren't really a good match.

My early forties saw me in several Friends With Benefits relationships. None were serious or all that long lasting. Nor did they sate my romantic longings. They were sexual and flat and void of any deep emotional connection.

Now I am in my fifties and have not dated or been in a relationship for over ten years. There is also no one on the horizon of possibility. I am alone. But the hours so no longer drain or cause me to weep. I have grown comfortable with myself and my company. Perhaps at some point a woman will enter my life and I will put down my current toys of escapist thinking. And together we might make a go of it and maybe even take a walk along the beach beneath a burnished yellow sun.