Chapter 1
This story is no longer raw, so I can finally tell it. I can finally sit down all these years later, and remember how I fell in love with an Irishman. He was strikingly tall and beautiful. His azure eyes made me think of cloudless days. His arms wrapped me up like a thick blanket. His accent was music and his passion was deep. He was my first love, and perhaps that is why it has taken me so long to write this down.
The beginning of us or the beginning of him. Where to start? I was 18 and he was 35. I was freckled from the sun and eager for love, and he was callused from holding nubby bits of pencils, his back swooped from leaning over his desk. He was a writer and I wanted to be a writer. He wrote me love poems on napkins, and I thought that I had fallen right into a romance novel. But it wasn’t a romance novel. It was a mess.
He was married. She was pregnant with number six. I know now that he wanted an escape, but back then I was sure that he loved me with every bit of his being. I was sure I could be a step-mother, a lover, be loved.
But I am getting off track. The point of this story is to tell you that I loved once, and it was everything. I met him on a hot summer day in California. He was writing for a TV show down south, and I was visiting my grandmother, who lived near an amusement park. Nana bought me dinner at a fancy little seafood place, and he was sitting across the room with his colleagues. Nana and I were puzzled over the menu, having no idea what we should order, and he came over and introduced us to scallops. He ordered us an appetizer on his bill and he winked at me, and he looked at me over and over again from his seat at his table while we ate at ours.
After the meal, he happened to exit at the same time as us. He escorted Nana to the car, and he asked for my number when she was safely buckled. I remember my heart racing. I remember the sticky sweat on the backs of my thighs. I remember saying yes and reciting my digits to him while he eagerly typed them into his phone. I remember noticing the phone costing more than my rent back home. When he called me, oh I thought I would die right then. He asked me to take a walk on the beach with him, and that is really how we started.
He kissed me with sand between my toes and the smell of fresh ocean in my nose. He kissed me with my hair flying wild and my fingers laced with his. He kissed me and he told me I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. I confessed my age then, and he confessed his. We sat on his jacket and talked about our lives. I told him about my drug addicted mother, my lost sister, my Nana. He told me about his career as a writer, his life as a dad, and finally about his wife.
When I look back, I know exactly why I didn’t run away. Where would I run? Back home to the drugs and the lies? Back home to the empty bedroom where my lost sister should be? I didn’t know where I was going exactly, but I knew I wanted to go with him. It was like I buckled myself in right then, and decided I would stay with him no matter what other confessions came from his mouth.
At 18, I was a naive little thing. I was pretty sure that I could fix him, and that is probably where I made my next mistake. I thought that by loving him enough, he’d be able to break free of the chains that bound him to another woman. But that didn’t happen.
We were hot and heavy for close to a year. He moved me down there so I could be near him while he worked on the show, and I told Nana that I wanted to be closer to her. I would spend my days cleaning and online shopping, reading books and smearing around watercolors on a pad of expensive paper. In the evenings, he would come with that hunched over look, and he would embrace me as if he were sure that I was the reason he had even gotten out of bed that morning.
Oh, the evenings were the best. During the day I could think of a million reasons to move back home, or call his wife, or cut my wrists. I could remember every detail about losing my sister, and I could dwell on those details until my eyes were bloodshot and my chest ached from the sobs. But oh, the evenings. Every evening was a chapter in my romance novel. Every evening was poetry whispered over chocolate covered strawberries and love making that touched parts of me I hadn’t known about previously. He was gentle but strong.
I loved my Irishman.