We met often, but never in anything but midnight. And by midnight I mean, it was in the dark.
"Barbara," he says to me. "I do not think you would ever love me if you could see my haircut in the light of day."
But I said, "Kiss me," and I ran my hands through the supposedly uneven hair on top of his head. We would spend the nights doing anything. Once, we sawed open the watermelons in my neighbor's yard. We scarfed them.
One night, we sat on my back porch and smoked 4 packs of cigarettes between us, for a new record. To be honest, I didn't smoke even all of that, but still I loved him.
And even another, we took the dogs for a run, 2 miles in the dark until we lay down in a field of mulch. When I tried to pick up a cactus, he didn't even say anything, and I had serious pain for a day or two.
But that was when I ran into him at the grocery store. I didn't know it was him, but he says to me, "Baby!"
And I looked at him curiously, and he comes up to me close and says low, "Honey, I mean I knew what you looked like. I saw pictures one time."
And here is what I said, I said, "Sid? That is you?" Because, for one, I recognized his voice, although the man in front of me looked like he had seen less better days than a meat grinder and his hair cut. Really. It was as atrocious as he had made it out to be.
So I took a moment to wonder. Does true love come that often? Fanatic love? The kind that makes you run wild in the night and cut down all the tulips in front of city hall when even though there is the Police Station right there? And I said to myself, hell no it does not come that often.
But it was too late because my face had scrunched up into wrinkles that the Botox can't undo, and he sees it with his eyes. Nope, this is not going to work even what with the running wild in the night.
"Sid, what you said. About the haircut," I shrug, clutching my grocery cart even closer as an ocean of bright commercialism in between us.
"I always told you, Barb. And you shoulda called it off months ago," meat-grinder-face walks away slowly from me.
"But Sid," I say to him. "I will always remember the tulips," I giggle. "And breaking into the prosthetics warehouse."
A little smile breaks out into that huge red face of his, and he sighs. But you just don't know til you know.