Turmoil

The lilacs are blooming. It's been two days since I walk out the door to be greeted by their sticky sweet scent that carried from our neighbor's front yard to our back door. I've always loved lilacs. When I was young and we lived in Australia, there was a lilac tree in our front yard. I used to pick the heavy clusters of dark pink blossoms for my mom to arrange in a vase for the front table. The lilacs of my memory don't quite smell the same, though-- their scent is heavier, darker, and somehow richer than the almost syrupy scent that emanates from the tree of pale lavender flowers next door.

He was there last night. The same green eyes that always seem to be smiling and assuring the world of brighter things to come. When we met, I lost myself in those eyes, letting the compassion they mirrored wash over me and wrap me up in a place where the hurt couldn't get in. He still gets that same funny look when we dance, that bemused expression that speaks of admiration, of amusement, of pleasure that the two of us have met, have understood, and are now caught up in a sort of shared communion--a moment that no one on the outside watching can fully understand. I dance for him alone and with him alone, an experience I hadn't had for so long and thought I would never recover.

After we moved back to the states, we stopped picking lilacs for the dining room table. The doctor said I was allergic to them. I was allergic to almost every kind of flower there was. In second grade, when we were asked to write a poem talking about how spring made us feel, I had nothing good to say.

Spring is a very bad time for me
Because I have allergies
I like flowers but I sneeze
I like trees but then I cough
It's like I'm sick, but I'm not

My teacher loved it, and told my mom she should send it in to Women's World or one of those other motherly kinds of magazines that they sell at the counter in grocery stores. I even got to read the poem aloud at the second grade open house. My mother never did send it to a magazine, though.

We still can't sleep together. I lie awake in his arms wishing that I had taken a Benadryl before heading to bed even though I have to get up at six to drive him to work. His chest hair scratches my back, but not as badly as his stubble when he moves his head. He's one of these guys who, if he shaved in the morning, will have a shadow by noon. I roll onto my back and look at him lying next to me. I run my finger lightly from his shoulder to his stomach, which even in sleep recoils from my touch. He's just as ticklish as before. I smile sleepily. His arm twitches involuntarily around me. I quietly disentangle myself from him and slip downstairs to get the Benadryl I forgot earlier.

My mom began to grow irises. They're hearty, they take very little work, and they don't give off a scent. There were two breeds of irises in the bag of bulbs my mom planted--a smaller flower with dark purple petals on the outside and a brown and gray sort of striped middle and the large flower with the same dark purple outside but with a beautiful pale lavender that was almost white on the inside. Several years later we added a third variety that were a solid pale yellow, the color of lemonade.

When he first came into my life, I really think he saved it. He gave me something to cling to besides all the anger, the hurt, the hatred. I've always asked too much of him. Seeing him there, where we met, or at least where both of us were going when we met, was something that I had feared even as I started the car and began that hour and fifteen minute drive. He didn't recognize me at first. He stopped and stared for a good minute while I stood there smiling and waiting. I've changed my hairstyle since he knew me, and he already had several drinks in him. He said he'd been waiting for me. He didn't know where I was living, so he waited, knowing that I would show up again. I had quit the scene except for Northampton after we broke up, and he had moved back to Hartford. But he had known that I couldn't stay away forever, that the music, the lights, the crowds would draw me back, and so he waited.

Next to the front porch of our house grew a pink rose bush. Every June it would come in bloom for exactly 2 weeks, its delicate scent barely escaping the blossoms. The summer of my sophomore year in high school, it started being eaten by something. My mom, in her eagerness to kill off the parasites, began a strict regimen of dustings and sprayings. Unfortunately, she was all too successful, for, not only did the parasites go away, but the rose bush died as well.

When we broke up, I wrote him a letter that I could never send. In it I promised myself that I wouldn't give him another chance to break my heart the way he had twice before. There was a time when I would have given him anything he asked. But I'm a different person now, with a new set of experiences, and I don't know what I feel for him anymore. The old feelings are still there, but I don't know how to fit them into my present life, or where to turn for answers. I'm not willing to give up the love I have now for something that could yet again be just a flash in the pan, a raging fire of passion that burns fast and bright and is gone.

The lilacs were in bloom when, a year ago, almost to the day, he walked out of my life. Last night, with the words "I still love you," he walked back in.

Copyright © 1996, Derik K. Cowan.