tracy@curls.nu

This is a fictional piece written on April 7, 2007 as an imagined history in my junior year Creative Writing class.

Ben & Me

One would imagine a love like ours would come with boxes filled with inanimate memories. Photographs, love notes, journals filled with bubble hearts and stirring words. A person’s worth to the world seems defined by how much money they have spent on consumer happiness: a big screen television, an Apple computer, five hundred dollar throw pillows. I hardly spent any money on this relationship yet it gave more to me than I ever could have hoped, and I felt like the richest girl on Earth.

Some couples actually go through the aggravation of marking every little milestone in their lives together. They treat their relationship like a newborn baby, snapping a picture for every day they see each other and filling up their photo album so they can look back on it someday, remembering that for one moment, they fulfilled that human right to love another unconditionally.

Ben and I did not do any of those things. Maybe we should have, because then it would be a lot easier to remember our times together. There isn’t anything wrong with a few pictures and there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing things down, but the thing is, it never occurred to me to do those things. I don’t even remember the date we began seeing each other.

Some may argue that we failed True Love 101, if such a course existed, but trite things like that do not matter to a young, stupid girl in love because she knows that regardless of what happens, she has an old, stupid boy in love standing beside her.

Perhaps I should have left while I still had time to make important, life-changing decisions that didn’t alter our fate. I suppose that option is always there, even if you’re seventy-three, but there aren’t as many choices then and usually you’re spending a lot of your money on hospital bills or your grandchildren.

I mistook Ben’s clingy nature for one hundred percent adorable, nothing more and nothing less. He would show up at my house at random times, just to say “hi”, and though anyone else would call it creepy, I called it amazing.

The fact that he never once tried to have sex with me until I brought it up, ten months after our love seed was planted, told me everything I thought I needed to know, and it was the argument I stuck by if anyone tried to tell me he was just using me.

“Ben is twenty-three? And you’re how old? You can’t possibly believe that someone six years older than you actually cares for your personality.” Something like that was always thrown at me when the topic of my boyfriend was brought up. Then I would say, “He really does love me. We haven’t even done it yet.” And that’s when you knew I meant business, because any girl at my high school jumped at the chance to brag about their hot, passionate nights filled with Jack Daniels and a horny college boy…or four. Anyone who didn’t have that never spoke of sex or anything like it out of sheer embarrassment.

Seems a bit oxymoronic, doesn’t it?

We weren’t about that. We weren’t really about anything. We just existed through each other’s hearts and minds, even when we weren’t together.

I never had any silly “I love you more!” conversations with Ben. I also never asked him if he missed me when I wasn’t around, not even once. He never asked me, either. We didn’t have to ask those things, even if they are only reassurance questions. We just knew that we were missed, and that is all that really mattered to us.

Looking back now, I do miss him. I miss him so much it hurts me to breathe and I usually have to sit down for a few minutes, wherever I am, when his face flashes before my eyes.

Unlike some other tragic love stories, neither of us made a silly drunk mistake. Rather, I woke up at two in the morning one night during the final semester in my senior year of college and decided that I yearned for the warmth of another man. So I rolled over and woke Ben up to tell him this. It sounds utterly absurd, but when you come to those kinds of realizations, you don’t hold them inside and hope they go away. Because they won’t go away, no matter how hard you try to push.

I wish I could say that it was easy to let him go, but how can you feel good about yourself when you’ve taken five years away from someone in their prime of life? During the years I was with Ben is the time when men are out at bars, seducing fresh high school graduates, scared and alone on their way to college or the working world. Twenty-eight meant no more fooling around, for many, twenty-eight meant settling down and raising a family, much like we were nearly ready to do.

I left him lost and alone when he was nearly thirty years old. We were finally planning our wedding, smoothing out the kinks of living together in a real house. Not many women my age could have been so lucky. Fresh out of college and a full down payment on an adorable one-story house sitting in a special savings account with both of our names, the account we would be using for all of our luxuries from here on out. I had a joint bank account with my high school boyfriend just four years out of high school. We trusted each other completely. How often did this happen? I would have liked to shove it in everyone’s face that laughed at us and said we wouldn’t make it.

It’s too bad they were very right, and there is no one to blame. Not him, not me. I blame the side of the bed I woke up on that fateful night. Feeling his warm breath on my neck and his arm wrapped tightly around my bare waist, I looked at the wall and whispered, “I don’t want to marry him.”

So I turned to him, and said, “You know what? I don’t feel as though I can marry you.” Like the sweet person he was, he laughed and said, “Oh, that’s good babe. I feel the same way,” pinching my bum and rolling back over to sleep.

So I got out of bed, put on my slippers, kissed him on the forehead and said, “I’m sorry, but I am absolutely serious.”

And that’s when he sat up and looked at me with the broken eyes that haunt my dreams, even now.

I wish I could give this love story some uplifting ending, where we run into each other on the street in five years and laugh about our innocence.

My hair would be short and professional. I’d be carrying a darling Coach purse, chatting on my cell phone to my husband about how he had better have supper ready for me by the time I pulled into the driveway. Ben would have a scruffy goatee, and he would sport the same worn-out jean jacket he’s had since our second year of dating. He’d look lost in thought, as he always did, and there would be no wedding band on his finger.

We would begin to pass each other, but stop short at the same moment and abruptly turn our heads. My cell would crash to the cold cement and he would fling his arms around me and bury his face in my sweet-smelling hair.

We would laugh: laugh about the irony of our meeting, laugh about the fact that though it has been five long years, it now feels as though we have never been apart. Ben would scoop me up and run to his car, tossing me in the passenger seat and exclaim, “I’ve been waiting for you for this long, now I’m never letting you go!” And we would ride off into the night, feeling closer and happier than we’d ever been.

If that were how this story ended, my life would be so much different. Instead, I am forced to state the truth. And the truth is: Ben is dead.

The truth is, I lie awake each night, wondering how different my life would have been if I hadn’t let him go so easily and so carelessly on that particular day. September 11, 2001.

I wonder what I could have done differently to cause him to remain in our warm bed that night instead of spending five hours packing his stuff and crying, then taking a bus to Logan Airport to fulfill his dream of living in California. Just like that. He was always so spontaneous. That was something I loved about him.

But this time, it got him in trouble, and it is something that will follow me to the grave. Because of so many things…my random realization, the inexplicable idiocy of another country, Ben’s ability to be incredibly impulsive…the love of my life is dead.

At 8:45 A.M. that fateful day, Flight 11 from Logan Airport headed to Los Angeles, California was hijacked by five foreign-born men. They crashed that airplane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing hundreds of people and altering thousands of lives for the rest of eternity.

I took away Ben’s last years of life as a free man and then his life was cut short. Because of this, I see his face whenever I am screwing a random boy I meet at the sleazy bars I still frequent. I see his face seated at the desks of my young and hopeful students. I hear his voice late at night when I am driving home.

Because of this, all of my lifelong accomplishments seem unnecessary and commonplace. I am a mindless drone, incapable of loving anyone else again, and at age thirty, I don’t feel as though I should even try. If I ever get close to someone again, I fear I will send them plunging to their death, exploding in a fiery mass of eternal love that they chose to give to me and I chose to selfishly turn away.

If someone else told me this story, I probably wouldn’t believe them. It sounds so ridiculous. How could a man just decide to up and leave his job, his hometown, his family…all in one night? But unfortunately it is true and I am left to wonder what he saw right before he was taken from the beauty of this earth. I hope it was me. I hope he wished that it were me sitting on that plane, because I wish to God every day that it was.

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