A Voice from the Past Chapter Thirty Six from The Ghosts: by Julianna Rowe

  Chapter Thirty-Six:  A Voice from the Past

Late one evening in March of what year I won’t divulge, I received a phone call from an old High School friend from California, where we lived before the dreaded move to Farmville that changed the life I had planned.  It was my High School sweetheart’s wife.  We had been in touch minimally through Facebook, but this call was a direct verbal conversation.

Some say puppy love, but most of us never forget our first love. In fact, one of my good friends reconnected with her first love at age thirteen.  They are having the time of their lives. He is eighty, and she is seventy-five!  Maybe it was the memory of their youth they wanted to revive?  Maybe the fear of getting old?  I don’t know.  All I know is they are happy in the now. They go dancing, out to eat, on road trips, and even do a bit of lovemaking on occasion.

I had been with my High School sweetheart when the news came, we were leaving the state forever. The blow was crushing to both of us, but considering I was underage, I would be moving across the United States from a big city to a farming community with my legal parents.  We said our goodbyes in tears. 

 I saw him one more time a few years later during a visit to the Grandparents, but time had stolen our time.

When I answered the phone this past March, the person on the other end asked me if I knew who this was.  I apologetically said I did not recognize the voice or the area code. I figured it was the vehicle warranty call I get three times a day.  But it was not.  She spoke.

“It’s me, Londa, Dwayne’s wife, your Dwayne, you know, from Los Angeles, from High School?  I know he would have married you if you hadn’t moved away.  He told me you, and he did the dirty. 

I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.  Londa was on a roll. 

The first words I spoke were.

“No, ma’am, Dwayne and I never did that!  He was just trying to make you jealous.”

Truly I don’t believe she believed me nor ever will, but it is the truth. 

When she got those foremost issues off her mind, she settled down, and we talked with normalcy about our lives and what had transpired over the decades. The fact is we talked for three and a half hours.  She told me she had decided she was sending me a plane ticket using Dwayne’s money for me to fly down to the next class reunion and surprise everyone.  Yes, indeed, she was going to enter the room with the other Dwayne’s wife.  Well, in a matter of speaking or something.  

I sort of laughed it off, thinking it would never happen.  Getting to go back to see all my friends and be physically at the place in life I never wanted to leave in the first place.  Full frigging circle!  After all these decades, and if it didn’t happen soon, I’d be strolling in with a dang walker instead of strolling in the American Bandstands, “The Stroll.”  Dare I dream of this really happening?  Me.  I had been used to the opposite.  I had been fighting the contrary for decades. She was dangling a dream bigger than even she realized in front of me through a U.S. Cellular technical wire three thousand miles away.  It was pure energy she was sending.

We are here on this planet to learn.  Evolve. And she was sending me unadulterated energy in the form of a blessing. But was I ready for it?  Had I overcome the bullying, the gaslighting, the triangulation, the manipulations, the interrogations, the deceptions, and the pissing in the wind fucking confusion I had been beaten up with over the years.  Did I have the confidence to get on a plane?  Meet and greet adults who had most likely done far better than me monetarily.  Answer the questions?  What have you made of yourself?  How many times have you been married?  How many fathers have fathered your children?  How much is in your IRA? Why haven’t you retired yet? And what’s with all those men we see struggling to stay above the water in the wake of your ship of life?  Is your Mom alive?  What did she leave you? How fucking many dogs have you had?  Why can’t you swim?  But Gawd you are gorgeous, don’t look any different than when we were in High School.  What’s your secret?  How long can you stay?  Can’t believe you and Daryl didn’t reconnect?

I had put myself in California at the reunion when I was still on the phone with Londa.  I had projected a negative outcome on something that hadn’t even happened yet, and those projections came from fear. I made the decision I was not going until I had my thinking on a bit straighter, as they say.

We had a lovely conversation between my wonderings off and back on.  She told me how Dwayne had provided her with a good life.  He repaired BMWs and other foreign cars.  She even sent me a photo of the home he bought her, no less than near a million-dollar dwelling.  And there I sat in my two-bedroom apartment, my little pink cutie kitchen, my bookshelves full of what I wanted to do and be, my two needy cats, some leftover furniture from the last guy still floundering in the wake behind my ship of fools, and my office where I write.  Oh, I forgot she also sent a photo of their huge sailboat.  I saw no men floundering behind her ship in its wake.  None. Shit, I suddenly felt like Elizabeth Taylor!  Everyone loved how she looked, and that was it. And sadly, my outer beauty was fading.

Well, now, hadn’t my bar been raised.  Could I live up to the expectations of who I should be, or who they thought I should be, or as in the old days when we did the Limbo, would I fall onto my ass and crash in a heap of deception. Who was I?  Was I the person she remembered and looked up to as the others did at my High School?  Or was I the woman who gave too many pieces of herself away leaving her with nothing left but the stories she wrote in books?  Who had I allowed to mess with my confidence?  I am sure there is a physics equation that would tell me how my life was systematically driven to this place.  And at that moment I felt like pueck warmed up.   I was so busy worrying about who had tried to kill me I couldn’t see who I was.  And I was still on the phone once again, trying to screw up what might be my last chance at paradise. At least what I thought was paradise.  California.  

I had been waiting for time to heal my wounds.  But it was me that had to do it. I had to step out of my office, out of my books, and make the move.