Past tense...

I often think about my first love. If not every day then certainly every week. I was a senior in high school and she was two years younger. This was in 1958 - 50 years ago! We would kiss and pet until the early hours of the morning. I was in paradise when we were together. She was popular. I was a loner.
Here's the thing: I used to imagine us married because I wanted to be with her all the time. But I hardly ever had the courage to call her because it would be so easy to hurt me if she started to see someone else. I used to have asthma a lot. I couldn't have survived the wound. So I pretended that I didn't care by not calling. The following year I went to Middlebury and she went to private school. (Her family was of the local elite.) I felt like nothing exposed to worldly and wealthy kids from private school. I soon returned home and went to state school, spiralling down.
I wonder how my life would have been different had I not fallen in love with her. Maybe I wouldn't have become as depressed.
We met up ten years later in Burlington and had a brief (six weeks) affair but I didn't have the same feelings of tenderness and destiny. Yet, I still wanted her to love me. But when I mentioned marriage she said she wasn't excited at the prospect (of bacon and eggs) and other mundanities and, besides, she would want to be a Catholic. I guess this meant she didn't care that much about me. Maybe she had become a little crazy by then, too. And I think I wanted to marry a Jewish person.
You'd think that would have been the end of it. A few weeks later I read in the paper that she had become engaged to someone else (a doctor.) I didn't see her again until 1994 - 26 years later. She had two kids. It was at a very unlikely place that we ran into each other: a Bar Mitzvah reception where I had been hired as a photographer and she as a guest. I didn't recognize her when she said my name. I was turned in the other direction and my wife said "Frank, someone is talking to you." I turned and saw a very thin older woman with curly graying hair.. I felt no attraction at all for her and actually felt as if I wanted to avoid her. I asked her if she ever dreamt about me (as I did about her) and she said 'no.' I blinked.
She called a couple of days later but I didn't want to start up with anything so I was off putting. We've never spoken again nor run into each other even though we both still live in the same town.
I think the unresolved past all gets back to my dual Gentile/Jewish heritage. Until I consciously made the choice to identify as Jewish after I graduated from college I was never sure of who or what I was. I don't know if I am even now. In fact, it's not the ethnic heritage; it's the difference between maturity and immaturity.