Directions Required

Pill Bottle Cap
photo by ocellnuri.

I had taken the Pharmacist out on her first date, back when I was nineteen and she was seventeen and we both had summer jobs at French Park. I was a maintenance guy and she worked concessions. I liked how she was pretty but didn't know it, and hid shyly behind her big frizzy Julia Roberts hair. I remember having to go inside to meet her mother before we drove off to a movie. We went to see "When Harry Met Sally." Very fitting, seeing how our paths would cross again later in life.

She was painfully shy and nervous. I thought she might throw up. But I didn't hold that against her; I remember the same feeling, back when I was fifteen and went on a date with an eighteen year Madonna look-a-like and lost my virginity in a church parking lot, but that's another story. We kissed at the end of the date. We talked a little at work afterwards, but I didn't ask her out again. I thought I was probably making her miserably nervous, and two shy people aren't the greatest combination.

Fast forward seventeen years and I get a couple of anonymous comments on this blog, and then a hand-made journal sent anonymously in the mail. Finally I get an email from Anonymous identifying herself. I could have been freaked out by this, a possible stalker coming back from the past to drug me (Pharmacist weapon of choice) and leave me for dead for having never taken her out on a second date. But I arranged to meet up with her at the Open Book coffee shop.

It is odd meeting up with somebody you haven't seen in seventeen years, but since I didn't know her all that well back then, it was more like a blind date. She did try passing me a tablet of some kind during our short meeting, some kind of Tylenol pain killer that might help my neck, she said, but I stuck with my ibuprofen just in case. Even though she may have had plans to leave me floating in the Mississippi river, I did ask her out the following weekend.

We went to a gourmet pizza place, walked by the river, and then went back to my place. Now I felt like the awkward one; I hadn't been on a real date since my divorce. The Pharmacist, though not as shy as she was when she was seventeen, is not one to make the first move. We're on the sofa when I finally just laugh nervously and kiss her. She's really learned how to kiss somewhere in the past years.

Either it was my neck pain or the fact that I was thirty-six and trying to make out on a sofa, but I couldn't get comfortable. I didn't know how to navigate us from the sofa to the bedroom. All it would have taken was something as simple as taking her hand and crossing the room, but it was a gulf. The sofa was a rodeo bull and I couldn't stay on its back. Damn slippery leather. Damn limbs of adult bodies too big and clumsy to be flopping around on a sofa like a couple of teenagers. We laughed. We lay there. We felt the engines shifting down to a slow idle and we both knew the ride was over, for that night, anyway.