“It’s not like we have been hooking up Ashley, we just have been talking,” I counter in a pathetic attempt to make what I had been doing sound alright. 

            “So after you hang up the phone with me at night, after you tell me you love me, you call her……….And that is supposed to be ok?” 

            “I didn’t expect to have these feelings for her. It just happened!” 

“Am I expected to feel better now?  My girlfriend tells me, if front of my father no less, that I am not there anymore and that she has found somebody who is and all you can offer me is that ‘it just happened’?”

“What do you want me to say Ashley, ‘I planned to meet her’, ‘I planned to feel that connection you and I had once’?  I didn’t cheat on you and I never would, but maybe we should take some time apart.”

Just then our argument was interrupted by an innocent by-stander who happened to walk into the bathroom at the wrong time, no doubt catching the last part of my outburst.  Thankfully she turned around and walked back out.  I knew Ashley was hurt by my confession and I was not really sure why I was doing what I was doing, because I did still love her with all my heart.  The words just seemed to pour out of me like verbal diarrhea.

            “Look,” she said composing herself as much as she possibly could given her level of rage, “let’s just get through the rest of the evening and we will discuss this later.”

            I silently agreed as we headed out of the bathroom.  I knew tonight was important to her, because her father had finally settled down to make dinner plans with her and she had wanted me to come.  I could have thought of better things to be doing on Valentine’s Day, but I forfeited the battle, as I had seemed to have been doing a lot of lately.

            I was not really sure how the conversation turned out the way it did, but I wished it hadn’t.  I wanted to tell her in private, where we could try and work on it without interruption.  Life doesn’t always go according to plan.  The remainder of the dinner was filled with awkwardness and building emotion.  I got the impression that her father missed everything that had transpired between Ashley and me that evening, because he seemed to go on, business as usual.  We said our ‘goodbyes’ to him and got in a cab back to LA.  We each sat in silence, as far away from each other as the backseat would allow, resting our foreheads on our hands, just thinking.  The cab driver would have been a complete imbecile not to have picked up on the tension between us, but it still came as a surprise when he asked if we were a couple.  Ashley tore her gaze away from the window to look at me, eyes showing nothing but pain and anger, “No.  No we are not.” 

            Wow.  I guess I had not entirely thought through what spending some time apart from her would actually mean.  For one, it meant that we were not a couple.  We had been together almost two years at that point.  Even though she had graduated in June and I was still in my senior year of high school, we managed to continue our relationship.  We were still close, but tension ran high and we seemed to have been fighting an awful lot.  But to actually hear her say those words, it was a slap back into reality.

Two weeks ago, we got into an argument about something minuscule and I wound up going without her to the concert at Gray that night.  After the show, as I sat at the bar speaking with another girl I had recognized from school, I felt a tap on my shoulder.  When I saw the girl’s face, I quickly identified her as the lead singer in the band.

“I’m Jenny,” she said offering her hand.  We went on and on long into the night and it felt so good to talk to someone new.  It brought out those feelings that I had once only felt with Ashley and it was in that moment that I had begun to wonder what it would be like to be with someone else. 

~

            I shake my head in disbelief as the train pulls to a halt.  Even looking back I am not sure what I was thinking.  I rationalize it away as being too young, a sort of sowing my wild oats if you will.  I exit the subway and as I walk down the street I can’t help but wonder ‘what is happening to me’.  If someone were to take the time to look, they would see that I am not inhabiting my body.  I am transported back in time.  Back almost ten years, yuck!  Where did the time go?  Am I really that old?  I am 28 years old and here I am dwelling on events that seemed to have happened a lifetime ago.  It seems silly, but I feel like I owe it to her, to remember.