In retrospect it occurs to me that unlike Charlie Brown,
I actually wrote to that cute red-headed girl a note in the first
place. So, while he is merely dreaming, I’m already scheming
to inflict the template of that dream on her. We’re both waiting,
me and Charlie, but I don’t think he’s waiting for a response.
I didn’t go there wanting to make or fall in love (always wanna);
I went expecting ritual, but not magic, and steeled my breath
against the ceremony’s cathartic rhythms, while checking her
left hand for rings, she, then, the imposingly beautiful and
remote, apparently solo, red-headed woman several rows up.
Later, a wag among the bride’s friends commented over scotch
that weddings were notorious parties for singles to hook up. I’ll
admit, I harbored such impressions too, from where I don’t know,
have been to weddings and not hooked up, but instead had friction
with the girlfriend, if plus one there was at the time, after the dance.
But I didn’t want to think about that, didn’t want to simply come on.
(Or perhaps simply didn’t want to think of the same thing that way)
I just smiled, my eyes flickering from his to wherever, beyond him,
she, at the moment, was, through the reception, whichever reunited
friend I was addressing, or their wives or children, flick: her.
I didn’t think even then that I might fall in terrible infatuation
before the night was through. We all followed her in our suits and
gowns across the town to Hairspray for dancing and a drag show.
Mere crush it might have remained, but for two or three hours there
and beyond; when she became vibrant virago, not remote. So real,
she became! I don’t know about Charlie and his uncommunicative
cute girl; I imagine that he just gazes at her from across the playground,
doodles her name or initials in secret corners of pages, and must,
sometimes, when they count off by fours, end up on her team by
sheer luck, but holds his devotion quietly from afar, so it doesn’t smudge.
Some day, after Charlie has grown up a little bit, he will write, and
await a response with his heart hanging in the balance, some bright-
eyed, cute, red-haired goddess having drawn him out. I also have charged
that ball with which Lucy taunted him, and missed the moving target,
landing hard. I too have not learned. I wrote her already, and await.
There was a cute red-haired girl, almost exactly ten years ago, who
left Ohio for California in a van when the first snow flew, taking a
good chunk of my heart with her, leaving hope in its place and informing
my dreams. We watched our hearts break, holding them together, and
loved, and loved it. And then wrote letters to each other, filled with
strange distant energy, for some time. She was inspirational and
challenging, not, I think, wanting a boyfriend, but moved by myself
and by another boy who, I saw, she clearly loved. Who didn’t love
that boy, who died from injuries received in a motorcycle crash
two years to the day after I survived a similar accident? I did.
I loved that she loved him, through the jealousy, her palpable love
a part of her, who rang me like a bell, that could not be excised or
denied. I held her anyway, under the harvest moon, and told her she
walked in speaking my language as we drew on her books. One of
her remarkable beauties and lessons is that she does not look back.
I did not dream there was a pattern of red-haired women in autumn,
I don’t want this to be mere iteration, the wedding, the harvest moon,
because then this uniquely beautiful, totally compelling woman will
also teach me love is brief, it is letting leave, and I long to cleave
to her, stupidly, wherever, committed, suffering like Corinthians says.
But especially there, under that moon, in that magic village, nestled in
those smoky valleys, shocked into such sudden promising awe. I did
not even dream of feeling any semblance of that flash of affinity again,
and would cultivate it in the crisp Appalachian wind, in the hillside
loam. I would preserve, perpetuate it, making and calling her home.