Ain't no sunshine when he's gone

I realized today that I have jumped into this leaving you all hang as to what happened to my wonderful mate. While there is some debate on that "officially" I will tell you what I believe happened. There are two point to doing this. The first is to clear up any confusion for the local friends and family as I don't know who was where when or got told what. The second point is to, once more, seriously SHOW YOU that you need to live your life to be happy and content NOW. Not tommorrow, not when you have a little more money, not when the kids grow up. You have to find a way to be loving, content and happy in your life now or risk never having it ever.

For the ending I am about to share to have the proper setting you need the history of our love. This IS the short version.

The mate and I went to the same small church as small children. Our families - clear to the great grands - also attended services there. I have a distinct memory of chasing him, in his Sunday suit, around the Sunday school rooms in the basement and out the door. He climbed a 5 foot retaining wall to get away and by the time I ran in, upstairs and out front and all the way back around he was making faces at me from safely inside his parent's car.

If I was around 5 he would have been almost 7. He was 14 and a half months older than me. So sometimes we were 50 and 52 and sometimes we were 50 and 51. It always confused me so I ignored it.

When we were little his great grama married my great grampa. They had both lost their mates so it was a second marriage for both of them. Our families would see each other at their parties and gatherings. We both mowed the same lawns over the years and such even after my family changed churches.

My next sure memory of him is in that same church basement as teens during a youth activity, probably a summer youth program. He was at a table learning to do a four strand braid and I was gluing something together seated behind and to his left. I stared at him the whole time. He kept looking back over his shoulder at me. He was a hunk!

He tells me that one day after that he went by our house at the pond on his bicycle and saw me mowing the lawn in my swimsuit and that my long hair was blowing in the wind while the sun glistened on my skin and he was hooked. Love at first sight. Only I hadn't noticed him....yet.

The next day he showed up at the pond to fish. We regarded that as "our" property and patroled it for jerks and trappers. If we didn't like you or the way you were fishing, like throwing back wounded fish instead of putting them out of their misery, we would gather in force and swim off the dam doing dive bombs and splashing up a storm to scare the fish away.

I happened to get there first and walked right toward him before he had his line out. I was about five feet back when I realized who it was. He was pretending not to notice me, fussing with his line. I just stared at him.

He had rich, dark brunette hair that was longish, heavy brows and thick lashes around large, dark hazel eyes, a strong nose, square on the end, the shadow of a mustasch over his cupid bow lips that were the color of dusky pink roses, a dimple in his square chin that I have always loved and he was tanned like an Indian Brave from the summer sun. He was wearing a tank top and cut off jeans with tennis shoes and no socks. He was solid and square from the shoulders to his feet. His thighs were showing the first signs of hair and his calfs were thick and well defined. I always called him my Percheron Man. He was built like a draft horse. He would have made a perfect centaur. He was that magical to me.

And it was love at first real sight for me, too. I was 13. I can't tell you how we got past the part where we were too shy to talk. I can tell you we almost fished out the pond that year. He was my first hand holder, my first kiss and, eventually, my first lover.

We dated until I was 15. He had trouble at home, like most of us doing, trying to get parents to see us as adults while still being too inexperienced to truely be adults. At 17 he had had enough and wanted to join the navy or the army and leave home. He wanted me to go with him. He proposed then but I was only 15 and everyone said we were too young. (They were right but I wish someone would have worked with us that said we could get engaged, write until he was settled in a year and then see where we stood. If we still wanted to marry I would be 17 and he would be 18 and we could marry after I was out of school....)

As a couple all that time we were, what was called then, HOT. I would hitch over to his town on my two hour lunch/studyhall to hang out. He would study with me after school. We both "fished" on the slightest excuse. Any event we could both be at we were there together. My sisters would spot him and holler, "Vaaaallllerie, He is at the Daaaaaaaaaaum!" and I would shoot out the door and down the path to the pond to be with him. He and his friends came to the house for fun and dinner sometimes. I would ride over to his house, about 6 miles and do homework there.

Then one January, near my birthday, he took another girl out tobogganing with all our friends. I was shamed and hurt. We fought. We made up. We fought again. We broke up. I was destroyed. His friend told me if I dated someone else it would make him mad and jealous and he would come back to me. So I dated an older boy. His friend was only half right. He came back every bit as hurt and angry as I had been. We fought. He couldn't deal with the fact that I went out with an older man. It made him mad and he never spoke to me again.

We both ran away from home that year. He was brought back in two weeks. I was gone 4 months before returning. We went out once after that but the the hurt and anger were too raw and the pride was too thick for us to work past alone. I lived through the heartbreak and so did he. But it never felt healed. It was something I just ignored and went on with my life.

I always carried a photo of us on a Christmas date in my wallet. Always. Through two marriages and more men and the good and the bad of life he was never further than my pocket from me. Through the coming years I would dream of him, call his mom and find out he was home on leave but she would never let me talk to him and I knew she never told him I called to say I had dreamed of him....I wouldn't have told him either if I was her.

A year later, we both had mates and our first children by them. Once, after all that and a second child, I saw him and his wife at a movie theater in a nearby town. It was the first showing of the first Star Wars movie, I think. He was in uniform and I thought he looked like a very pissed off movie star. He must have seen me before I saw him.

They were behind me and across the center isle, it was dark, but I knew someone was watching me. I finally spotted him. With his short hair and the uniform I almost didn't recognize him he was so handsome. His face was cold as stone, eyes straight ahead every time I tried to catch them. They got out so quickly at the end of the movie I never did find him to speak to them.

There is more but this is enough to show you we were lovers young but deeply.

When I moved back to Michigan after 2 divorces and a relationship that failed after two and half years I was 30, depressed, broke and alone. I got a job at a bakery. After a week or so I realized the first shift worker was his sister. She had told him I was in town and told me one day that he wanted to see me. I had my Mom drive by his place one day with the stepdad and me to say hello. He came out and we spoke for under 3 minutes I bet. But the first eye contact, the mutual recognition, shock and yearning we felt, doomed us all.

We both knew then that we were still in love. I stayed out of his town, went to work and home and stayed busy. After two more weeks his sister begged me to call him. He wasn't eating, couldn't sleep, rode his bike all over trying to remember where my grama lived as I was staying with her and just in general seemed to her to be going nuts. I didn't want anything more to do with him, knowing my heart, because he was married. I had been the victim of the other woman and had no desire to be her. But she did convince me to talk to him at least.

So we set up a meet. After running into his father, his step mother and his sister where we were meeting we left together anyway and rode off on his Sportster. He took us right back to the pond. We walked the fields and talked for hours. He spent years angry at himself for not being able to get me back but thought I must hate him for hurting me. I spent years wondering how seeing another guy made him so hate me that he would never speak to me again, even to say good bye when he went in the Army, after he saw another girl first. When we got to the now we both understood it was youth and pride that ripped us apart. He had still wanted me and I had still wanted him and now we were screwed.

But is was like someone took a thousand pounds of hurt off my heart. We had talked and knew where we stood and he still loved me and he knew I still loved him. There was no doubt in our hearts. I was older now. I knew lust well and I knew infatuation. This was not them. And there, in the pines, with a dog around the sun on the most perfect day ever created in April we forgave each other our pettiness and meanesses and found our love still whole and beautiful between us.

We stole that day that was 80 degrees and sunny in April from everyone else and spent the time until sundown together. We put 150 or more miles on the bike. We stopped to eat. We rode his favorite roads. We walked in the woods everywhere by rivers and held hands. And we talked about everything.

God gave us that one perfect day and we both treasured it ever after. But like all mortal days, it ended. He took me home and I kissed him good bye. That should have been the end of the story.

Then it was back to the real world. It was skewed. Short version is I tried to be a friend of the family, not a threat to them. They helped me get a bike so I had cheap transportation. I watched the kids so they could go out, taught the wife to ride a motorcycle so they would have more in common, had my kids over and took them all out fishing and on picnics....and then, about six months later, he crashed his bike in front of me and I knew I wanted my turn with my man and had to leave town. It hurt even more because by then I cared about all of them and hated to leave but I could not trust myself.

It was a long cold year of heartaches all around but after a year of trying to stay with his family and make it till the kids were grown he left them to moved in with me in my little apartment in another town. We could finally just love each other. There was guilt and grief and practical life to be worked through but we loved and treasured each other every minute of everyday.

I wanted you to see that this is a lifetime story. It might have had many different middles but from the beginning to the end we were a pair in a story of "true love".