I recently learned that my first love has fallen on hard times, his wife of many years leaving him high and dry. Pushing sixty, all his financial eggs in one basket, he is emotionally and financially devastated. This is a man I tend to romanticize. The youngest of four with a boisterous extended family, he occupies my land of what-ifs, the fantasy place of perennial loneliness. For a brief, hollowed-out moment after hearing his news, nostalgia clogged my mind. I fell back into images of large family dinners, the conversation flowing, his family supporting us like a marriage bed, like a hug after a death, lulling me into a sense of ease. It was the kind of feeling I would get in elementary school when my grandmother picked me up for the weekend. It was a memory of safety and care, no need to worry. Someone else had their eyes on the wolves in the woods.

But the family I once knew is no longer. Nieces and nephews that did not exist when I knew this man are fully grown and married. His father is long dead, his mother in her 80s. We are the old guard now. As for the rest of it, the foundation of that relationship, I also remember the ways in which he was comfortable with stasis. Whether this is a relic of his childhood, personality, or years gone up in smoke is unclear. I do not have the full story, so I fill in the blanks.

And what of this nostalgia? Is it about being fourteen to his twenty, the nights of waiting and other sordid, obscure events? I had my own youthful fecklessness and cruelties, my emotional struggles projected on to him. Perhaps we had nothing in common except for timing and a certain shared sensibility, us against the world. Perhaps it all comes down to missing being young, being able to believe in the illusion of endless possibilities in a world that felt less bleak.

I have a child that will be in college soon, a young person who lives at a time in which climate change cannot be denied and certain rights are no longer guaranteed, in which the rabid minority hopes to control the ineffectual majority. My project of the last eighteen years is almost complete. I am not the same person I was when his father and I became parents. We must now create meaning in a world that feels objectively meaningless and cruel. Reinvention is necessary for emotional survival. My hankerings for seventeen, for my naïve adolescent stupidity, are understandable. In my mind I’m going to Cecil County, sinking empty beer bottles in the Bohemia, listening to Ted Nugent at full blast with no thought or worry about his politics, imagining a future in which me and my man would live on the same street forever and ever.

It’s not enough. The stone skips across the surface before dropping into murk. I know too much and living in a fantasy is counterproductive. But, as usual, writing it out helps me make meaning of it. It creates a story. It gives me control of the narrative. I write a foundation for the future, my gaze steely and my intentions set.

Note: I edited this post today (September 5) for two reasons. One is because I just realized I used the photo in a previous post. The other is to lightly edit what I wrote about this ex of mine. Though my regular readership has dropped down to almost nothing, this person could easily recognize himself. Perhaps he has already seen it (hello there.). I often forget that I am not writing in the dark, that writing anonymously does not protect others, and, well, words can cause pain. But removing the post feels cowardly. So, dear readers, both random and regular, mea culpa, mea culpa.