Early sophomore year, I fall in love with Alejandro “Ale” Plesch. We meet during the first month of Introductory Mandarin Chinese, fatefully paired for a vocabulary exercise. I had already been watching him. His lean, athletic build would cross the classroom every morning—skate-board tucked under one arm—and my eyes would secretly usher him to his seat.
Today’s vocabulary: family members and vocations. We learn how to say, “My mother is an artist.“ “My father is a businessman.” Ignoring the present tense impossibility of my dad, I turn to my partner — this gorgeous, half-Vietnamese, half-Swiss/Argentinian boyish man — but instead of commencing the exercise, he furrows his dark brow and says, “I’m not into this. My dad’s dead.”
In a dangerous instant, the doors of my heart are thrown open and Ale walks in.
While the rest of class practices their pronounciation, this stranger and I share stories about our dead fathers. He’s the first peer I know who has lost a dad. Both, suddenly. Both, tragically — mine from a Mac truck, his from a bad meatball in Bangladesh. Mystery surrounds both exits and inflates their already larger-than-life status.
Life post-dad and pre-Ale, was an apocalyptic drought. When I meet Ale, a mad thirst awakens in my cells and Ale is my oasis. We become inseparable. We write letters to our fathers and bury them deep in the foothills of the Rockies. We take ecstasy and scream their disembodied names back into existence. Ale is fearless and passionate because he knows no other way. I flirt with fearlessness and passion because I need his way near.
Our first summer break we road trip to Baja, traveling dirt roads with nothing but tortillas, canned beans, hot sauce, and sharp knives for hunting urchin and scallops in the shallow Sea of Cortez. Pacifico beer is our water. Discarded mattresses on empty beaches are our thrones. At night, the star-studded sky tips upside down and our naked bodies tangle in bioluminescence. At sunrise, we are the last humans watching the only show on earth. We live like a king and queen in a palace of our own making, securing a bond with each other that is born not from two souls, but four.
After a month of adventure, we return to the states so I can spend August with mom in Wisconsin. I can’t conceive of leaving Ale behind, not for a day, much less an entire month, but introducing him to my former life feels scary. Blending worlds is too confusing, too unmooring, for my chameleon identity.
On my way out of town, I park in front of Ale’s attic apartment building to say goodbye. I pause for a moment and watch him before exiting the car. He sits on the first floor stoop smoking a cigarette, feet resting on the deck of his skateboard. He notices me but his expression doesn’t change; unlike me, Ale’s compass needle moves independently from its surroundings. I love looking at this human. His jet-black hair, his silky, burnt-caramel skin. He looks pissed off when he’s not smiling. But just under the scowl there are deep, childlike dimples that, when offered, make me feel like I’m the only woman in the world.
As I pull away, Earth’s female population obliterated, I savor the ash still on my lips.
The sixteen hour drive between Colorado and Wisconsin is long and straight — plenty of spaciousness to allow the feelings of young love to take on epic, cinematic proportions. I put Ale’s Blue Jamaica mixtape into the cassette player and am instantly transported back to timeless nights spent together under the light of his bedroom’s single blue bulb. I lost my virginity in this room — through Ale’s attentive desire my anatomy turned from from textbook to technicolor.
I turn the volume dial up on the car radio. Jimmy Hendrix, Astrud Gilberto, and Miles Davis deliver me back into his arms.
A thawing. Tears begin to stream down my face.
I am suddenly reminded of the day my best friend Jenny moved — my twelve year old head buried in mom’s lap but somehow watching my sadness from ten feet above. And now, I’m doing it again. I see a young woman driving a car. Cornfield rivers rush alongside her. Afternoon sunlight and long shadows carve shapes through the window and over her bare shoulder. Tears grab the light and send morse code signals out to no one. But it doesn’t matter because her tears make it real. They make her real. She sees her pain and it’s terrifyingly right.
The paradox of heartache is revealed. Look long and hard enough at it, and suddenly beauty stares back.
August 3, 1994
Dear Charlie,
You were once in a bar fight, or so I’m told. After finishing your set at a small, rural haunt somewhere in Wisconsin, a drunk patron approached the stage. His girlfriend had been flirting with you. Or maybe you flirted with her? Not one for drama, you dismissed his verbal attack, packed your instruments and walked out to the snowy parking lot. The man was waiting for you.
With your cheek pressed into icy gravel, he kicked you in the gut over and over. Instead of fighting back, you lay there, surrendered and stunned at the absurd beauty of it all as snow danced under a single sodium vapor bulb.
I can see it clearly — a few cars, the exterior of a dismal country bar, a single source of light illuminating the scene. One man is painted with rage, the other in blood. The soundtrack, silent. Snow flakes insist on blanketing horror with wonder and stillness.
You understand, don’t you? Beauty and pain, such mad lovers.
One of my favorite things about your writing is that it’s incredibly personal, but there’s something about the specificity that allows me, as a reader, to drop into my own memories (like that of first love!). Not just anyone can pull that trick off.
Like all the others have said. Beautiful writing Kimberly, just beautiful.