Clutch it like a cornerstone, otherwise it all comes down.

[imported_Bjorn_Andrews]

<center>And now we're grown-up orphans that never knew their names;</center><center>we don't belong to no one -- that's a shame.</center><center>But you could hide beside me, maybe for awhile,</center><center>and I won't tell no one your name</center><center>and I won't tell 'em your name.</center>

<center>Scars are souvenirs you never lose, the past is never far.</center><center>Did you lose yourself somewhere out there?</center><center>Did you get to be a star?</center><center>And don't it make you sad to know that life,</center><center>is more than who we are?</center>

<center>-- Goo Goo Dolls, "Name"</center>

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<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ April 05, 2008 05:34 PM: Message edited by: Bjorn_Andrews ]</font>

[imported_Bjorn_Andrews]

(Originally written/posted on 09.16.2003.)

Her name was Dahlia, and she preferred Australian dahlias to the thorns of red roses. I remember the tender shape of her girl's hands, busy as she cut the excess stems over my apartment kitchen sink to place them one by one in tiny, Chinese vases that she'd purchased earlier that afternoon in the downtown flea market. Their blossoms were explosions, round and prickly, blooming out all around. Deep red, summer popsicle-orange, sinking yellow all whorled together like fire.

If there's one thing hard to forget about a woman, it's the perfume she wears. You smell it in the morning when she's freshly showered, a towel curved under her armpits, her kiss on your jaw after you've just shaved; you smell it on the sheets of the bed after she's been there with you, naked and willing; you smell it even after she's sent for all her things and left you, on the pillowcase and in the closet where her winter coat still hangs and then on the collar of your unwashed shirts. Hers was Eternity, by Calvin Klein. Ironic, really, because I'm never going to forget that girl.

I lived in Boston, Massachusetts at the time; that's where I was born and bred. My parents were still married even though they slept in two separate rooms, and I was one of six siblings; one brother, four sisters, and a niece. I met Dahlia when I agreed to paint her for my friend. Her beauty was sly, playful then. A short bob of dirty blonde hair at the throat, flimsy out-swept curls at the tips. Grey-eyed, like city smog seen from a distance at dawn. Thin neck, long hips, longer legs. She reminded me of a modern-day Aphrodite. I still wake up with that same desire I felt then sometimes when I dream of her; thighs stiff and abdomen pulsing, reaching.

A year later after our first meeting, I rented a slightly larger apartment that we decided to share. I was in my dwindling mid-twenties, but I'd never loved someone before. There were times I thought I had, but no. I loved Dahlia, and I know that for certain because I still do today.

I loved the way she drank her coffee in bed: she'd open the blinds just the perfect fraction to paint the bedroom in pale gold as she collapsed back into the pillows framing the headboard, one arm extended on my pillow to tickle her middle and finger an exact inch under my ear, twining my hair while she watched the morning news. I loved how on the weekends, she'd pad around the apartment in her terrycloth pajama bottoms and one of my wifebeaters, pin her hair back when it grew longer with a pencil from my desk, water and talk to all her plants in a resonant hum. I loved how she didn't care if I put the toilet seat back down or not, I loved the way she bit her bottom lip after a particularly gentle kiss, and most of all, I really just loved her.

About a year after the day we moved in together, and around two years since the day I'd met her, Dahlia got pregnant. That's when everything started to fall apart. I had already planned to propose to her and was looking for the ring when she told me one afternoon, solemn and blue-lipped over dinner. I wanted it, of course. To my surprise, she didn't. We fought until the walls shook, until the previously untouchable warmth between us slipped away and hid under the bed like a frightened kid.

The week after was hell. We barely spoke, rarely touched. I came home one afternoon to find most of her stuff gone, and a letter from one of her friends letting me know that she'd gotten an abortion that morning. That she wasn't coming back home, it was over, and that she wanted me to pack up the rest of her belongings and send them to her mother's house. I tried to see her afterward, did everything I could, but it was just over. There was nothing I could try that I hadn't already. It ended just as quietly as it started.

It's not as if I hope for a reconciliation. Dahlia is part of the past, not the future, but this story was an important one. She was the first person I lost my heart to and the first person to break it, even if she wasn't the last on either account.

That makes her unforgettable.

[imported_Bjorn_Andrews]

(Originally written/posted on 09.17.2003.)

He would never remember to tell you this, but when we met it was May, not afternoon but late morning, and it was raining out April's leftover shadows. He would never tell you too much about himself directly, only of the delicately graceful details and of me. I must tell my own perspective because otherwise our story would be incomplete, and I don't think I could handle that. It stretched out through two years of our lives and changed us both forever; it was a wonderful story. A beautiful story. Don't let the ending taint it for you, that wasn't until much later.

Bjorn. I liked his name because it struck me as unique; it wasn't John or David or Mark. It had that kind of quality where it rolled off your tongue whether the tongue was meant to do such acrobatics or not, was soft chaos and sweltered from behind the flats of teeth. He remembers my perfume the way I remember his aftershave. For me, it was cleaning the bathroom on Sunday and smelling it on a still-damp towel pressed to my nose before I threw it in the laundry bin.

It was the night he announced reservations for Restaurant Zinc with its dim-lit ambience and massive dark-wood bar trimmed in ornate zinc that lent the impression of a blast from a more eloquent era -- him disarming in a suit to compliment my svelte lilac dress, bending to push my chair in as I sat, his cheek at my temple; the rush of smells I raced after: urban spice, blended amber, orange peels, subtly sharp cedar, just a hint of tobacco lining. Dolce & Gabbana, his provocatively patterned conflict of gentleness and roughness. It suited him well. At times when I'm lonely, I imagine I can still catch a whiff of it on my own skin. Branded as I am. My heart still bears his burnmarks.

You must understand. I never meant to hurt him, my intent was to never let go; but I am not perfect, I am partly the Aphrodite he claims me to've been. I was, am vain. Selfish, and too proud. We had our fights, but they were few and far between, quietly handled with his steadfast reason. I never felt as if I deserved him. He was too good to be true, I say this with the experience of a woman that's been with enough half devils and sycophants, and I kept waiting for the floor dissolve below our dancing feet.

If I must limit myself, as he did, to things I remember the most fondly, these are it. He drank whiskey like water, and it was with an aesthetic pleasure I would watch the sweat bead on his skin after the second glass -- a thin film, like mist, that made him all the more warmly golden. He never smoked then because he insisted it was bad for the health, and quickly broke me of the habit with relentless kisses until July. While he wasn't the best dresser, his style complimented him and I never sought to improve it -- I loved the way he looked in his cashmere and thin wool sweaters rolled up to the elbow, the twine of hemp at his throat, his simple linen pants.

I loved the unintentional five o'clock shadows, the paint stains on his roughened knuckles, the leisure at which he moved. I loved the way he loved me. In the half-dark of our bedroom, the cut of his shoulders bent over me and the sigh ground out like ash in his arched throat; I loved the way he placed one hand behind my head so that it wouldn't knock into the headboard a second time, and that he always waited. I won't ever forget the way he shone like dawn even at midnight; it keeps my ghosts away.

I suppose I've wasted enough time with fanciful memories. I just didn't want to confess yet, because an admittance is closer to remembrance than anything else. It's easier to pretend that there wasn't a dark secret beneath the fairytale.

Before I met Bjorn, I wasn't entirely the same person. I was an addict, a thief, a quick liar. Erik, a mutual friend of ours and an aspiring artist like Bjorn, helped me withdraw before I reached the point of no return. I do not add details, because that is a darker story. It has nothing to do with him, or us. It isn't necessary to this story. He was the one that advised that I become an artist's model; I had a slightly unusual yet classic look. It was an honest way to pay the bills. I was eight months into recovery when Bjorn started to paint me.

I stuck with the occupation throughout are relationship. Bjorn knew a lot of people, had a lot of connections that were nowhere near "big-time," but it kept me working. The last four months of our relationship, I let myself fall into a bad crowd of artists, musicians, minor entertainers. I fed old habits. One night, I crossed the line and slept with someone else without protection; Bjorn and I always used protection, always. Three weeks later at the doctor's office, I'm told I'm pregnant. Perhaps, it was all less dramatic than I made it out to be. Perhaps, he would've forgiven me. I did not want to take the chance, however, to see the look on his face when I told him. I did not want to go from lover to stranger in his eyes where I could see them.

A month later, I had finally decided to tell him I was pregnant. I had no plan, no idea of how I would say what I needed to, and when the time came, it turned out that I couldn't say the truth at all.

The week after was hell. The tangible electricity of tension that hummed in the air throughout our apartment, the glassware accidentally broken out of nervousness around each other, the indecision and the guilt and the fear that made me feel as if the walls were shrinking in around me. What would I do? On the fifth night while he was asleep, I slipped into the kitchen to call a friend for advice, knuckled my mouth for the sting of tears and wept into the phone irrationally. I was younger then. I saw no way out of the dark season.

I wrote a lie on the note my friend took to our apartment when I left with half of my things. I stayed at my mother's house just outside of the city and still remember the dahlias he sent through our corner-street flora shop, the desperate letters, the phone calls I told my mother I would not accept. I still remember night he staggered half-drunk up the driveway and banged his fists against the door, yelling at the top of his lungs for me to come down to him, to come home, to tell him what happened because he didn't understand; an hour later, an aging neighbor sternly convinced him to take a taxi (and he'd provide the phone, young man) and that was the last warning because he was going to call the police.

I never heard from him after that. Heard from Erik, he left the city for a gallery gig in some city I'd never even heard of several months after that night; packed up all his linens, his oil paints, his shaving razor and went forward into life with a new naked canvas, and inevitably, a new dream.

I'm not silly enough to ever hope for a reconciliation; I'd be too proud to ask. I have a daughter now and she'll be three next April. I named her Gaea after Greek mythology, because she was the daughter of Chaos (as I certainly brought such into that man's heart), and because she wanted all of her children no matter what, to show her that by the time the eight and a half months of wait was up, I had wanted her even though I lost him in the process. She looks exactly like her father, not Bjorn.

I don't think he knows the truth, and I doubt he ever will. Who would tell him, and what for? He wasn't the first man I lost my heart to, but he's the only one that never broke it and his was the only heart I ever regretted breaking.

That makes him unforgettable.


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