May: Inspired by song May by James Durbin
I met her when I was five. Some say it's young love that caught our attention - that we were childhood sweethearts. But our love was so much more than that... it was infinite.
May and I were two children that believed anything our parents would tell us. If we jumped high enough on her trampoline, we'd touch the moon; if we swung off the highest point we could get on the swings, we would be engulfed by the sun. Little did we know that, just a few years later, they would shed upon us the worst nightmare that all beings avoided at all cost: reality.
I was first introduced to the God-forsaken thing when I was ten. I found out what had really happened to my parents - why I truly lived with my aunt and uncle for all those years. I ran into a picture of them - my mom and dad - when I was cleaning out my room. It was a picture of the three of us in the hospital when I was being born.
When I showed my aunt and asked her the story behind it, she had paused and asked for me to sit down beside her. She told me the story of my birth - what I had wanted to hear in the first place. But what I expected to be a happily-ever-after turned into a twisted tale of my mother's passing during delivery and my father's inability to raise me because I had Her eyes.
That's when I knew that this world wasn't a kind one.
But May showed me every chance she had that my outlook of the world was wrong.
The first time she touched my hand, we were sixteen - fresh juniors in high school. I was technically an asshole for not touching her hand first, but I had a valid excuse then: I was scared as hell. We'd "held" hands many times before, but nothing so purposefully; nothing so intimate. She slid her fingers over to where my hand rested beside me on the chair's arm and, without any precaution, carefully slid hers into mine.
It was like hand sex.
We never looked at each other - we just stayed silent on her balcony, our chairs scooched side-by-side and our hands engulfed in the other's - but I knew right then that she could be the one that would make me an honest man.
We had our first kiss on that balcony several months afterward. It was small, but it was nice. No nose bumping or teeth clashing or anything. We held hands every chance we got then, thumbs brushing against the other's palm, and hands squeezing each other's in a silent I like you.
But "I like you's" suddenly transformed into "I love you's," and junior year fell into an unforgettable summer. We went out to the lake - my family, May and I - and stayed in a cabin. Of course we didn't share a room (my aunt wasn't stupid), but besides nighttime, we spent as much time together as we could.
We spent more time at the lake than anywhere else, and didn't care to befriend any of our neighbors there. We tried to reenact "The Lift" from Dirty Dancing and failed quite terribly every time. We laughed hysterically and kissed, because that's what young lovers did.
Our last night there, we were sitting on the lakehouse's balcony, our feet dangling over the edge of the fence as we sat on top of it. She took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze, and I looked at her and found her eyes meeting mine. I asked her what was wrong, and she asked if I could keep a promise.
Of course, I replied.
"Promise me we'll get married one day," she had whispered, looking away from me wistfully and out at the lake below us. "That we'll have a baby named Wendy and we'll both love and spoil her to death."
Marriage? I had thought, my mind racing. A baby?
But when she tugged at my hand and pulled me away from my destroying thoughts, I smiled down at her and said the golden words: I promise.
We never broke our promise to each other - the promise of a future together. And when life went by sooner than we ever could have seen, lights went down on graduation... and then on a wedding ring. A few days before the two of us graduated, I went next door to her house when I knew she was away and asked her father for his blessing.
He denied me.
He denied us.
"You're too young," he had said, his voice sincere but his words hitting me like bullets. "I can't possibly give her away." I asked him if he trusted me. "Of course, son," he had sighed. "I just think you two aren't ready for such a commitment."
But he never said that I couldn't propose.
My aunt helped me get ready that morning, straightening my tie and ironing my snot-green gown. I slicked my hair back - the way May liked it the best - and picked her up from her house. It's like the entire morning was dragging - that the clock was purposefully ticking each second slower every chance it got.
But man was it worth the wait.
My family held a dinner that night at the summer lakehouse just out of town. Her family came, as well as some of our close friends and even neighbors that had watched us grow up all those years. After we ate, I took May out to the balcony where we had been just one year before, bent down on one knee, and asked her to be with me forever.
Her answer changed our lives.
Her father wasn't pleased when everyone noticed the ring a few moments later - ideally, whenever we went back inside. The lakehouse wasn't very private, to say the least, with all the glass doors and windows. But towards the end of the celebration when everyone was saying their goodbyes and hugging, her father came up to me and held out his hand for me to shake. I took it questionably and he gave me a hard smile, telling me to be good to his little girl.
We never got married until almost two full years later, the summer after our sophomore year. She didn't want to be given away by anyone else but her father, and the only way he would do so was if we waited until then, when he found us "old enough" to be officially committed to each other.
The wedding was small - nothing to make a big deal about. She wore a beautiful, loose white dress, and I wore a suit she picked out for me. A million thoughts of love raced through my mind the first sight I caught of her coming out of the summer lakehouse and out onto the deck (the aisle). Thoughts that were impossible to deny.
The same people who had shown up at our graduation party so many years ago came back along with a few friends we had made during our time in college, and most of them left right after the ceremony because of the lack of food we had provided (which was close to none.)
We had written our own vows, promising each other once again a brilliant future together. She spoke her words of wisdom (because she always seemed to have some) and words of love, never looking me in the eyes. She never did. Not when we're intimate in the presence of others, and I didn't expect anything less from her - especially during an occasion like this.
She said to me while facing the splintered dock, "I love you," and that I'll have to love her even when all I want to do is stop doing so. She was like she was, indeed.
I spoke my dully-spoken words of love to her, and even told her aloud that I couldn't possibly had ever been able to form the right set of words for everything to perfectly shape the love that I had for her. Not ever. But, instead, I could translate them in our kiss - the kiss that would mark the first adventure of ours as newly-weds.
When the ceremony was over and May became my wife, people came up to me and congratulated me on having the most beautiful woman in town. "I could see the sun in her eyes when she was reading you her vows," they said.
In place of our honeymoon, we bought all of the newspapers we could get just for the home-owners ads inside. We found one right on the outskirts of town - a one-story with a terrible painting job. But we needed one... especially since we had a baby on the way.
We prepared Wendy's room before anything else in the house, making sure at least ten-dozen times that it was pristine and warm enough for a newborn baby. Of course we still had six months left before she was born, but we wanted everything to be ready for her arrival so that we didn't have to worry about anything besides school and her.
When school resumed, it was quite a drive. It wasn't the closest college to our house, but it definitely could've been further. Sometimes I would skip classes to work more on the house. Not any important classes, but classes that I could ace the final (or at least just pass it) without having to attend the session that particular day.
When she hit six-months into her pregnancy, we went to our doctor again for a check-up. What we expected was a positive ultrasound, but what we received was the worst news... a tragic notification. One that came too late.
Wendy was born December 21, 1991. May passed away the following day.
Wendy grew right out of my caressing arms and before my eyes, while I never got over mourning over my sweet May. I never knew how to say what I felt to anyone - not even myself. She would love you on your worst day and didn't care about the mistakes.... She was like she was.
When she found out about the cool things you could do to your hair - the way it could twist into different styles - Wendy wanted me to shape them for her before school. I just couldn't. May could've. But she wasn't there.
Often times I would sit out on the balcony outside of our bedroom - the one we had decided to build before Wendy's delivery - and think of her. I would rest my hand open on the arm of her empty wooden rocking-chair adjacent to my occupied one, imagining her finally meeting my eyes and telling me the impossible: That everything was going to be alright.
Wendy caught me out there one night, watching me look up at the moonlit sky and talk to her mother as if she were right there - as if she was the man in the moon. She softly made her entrance noticed by calling out to me from my bedroom door back inside, and I, being caught off guard, looked at her with wide eyes. I was stunned to see her. She had never seen me talk to her mom like that. Or like anything at all.
She had walked into my room and then stopped right outside the balcony, looking at May's empty rocking chair as if it were a monumental object. I looked at her, and then at the chair. I didn't meet her eyes when I said the unpredictable: Sit.
That night I told her everything she wanted to know about her mom; about my May. I looked into Wendy's eyes while I told her all about my life-long sweetheart; about how determined of a person she was; about how she didn't want to give her un-born daughter up just because she would lose her own life in the process.
I stopped when I couldn't speak anymore.
Wendy put me to bed that night, instead of the other way around. She didn't seem frazzled. Rather, she seemed quite at peace - like she'd always known how special her mom was to me, and now that she finally knew who she was, she was special to her too.
She cut her hair into a pixie when she turned sixteen, deciding she liked the alternative look. She didn't like being like "everyone else"; she liked being herself. She was a very proud girl - very confident of herself. She was daring and exciting, and quite frankly scared the hell out of me more times than not.
She put me through hell, but May's father made a point one day - whose little girl didn't make their parents fall over the edge in anxiety and madness?
Wendy went away for college - off to some liberal school out of town. She'd always been so opinionated - so feisty. I never doubted her brilliance, nor her capacity to whoop someone's ass. She met the love of her life at a coffee shop near her dorm. Her name was Charlotte, though she liked to be called Charie. The moment they met, they knew they were meant to be together, so they didn't waste any time.
No wedding invitations were sent - only calls were made to immediate family, and we all went to the one and only lakehouse that wasn't even ours anymore. A random preacher that either Wendy or Charlie must've called up came late, but whenever he finally arrived I walked my Wendy down the aisle... and could only see May.
I could see May jumping on the trampoline, her body a silhouette against the beaming sunset; I could see her pale arms wrapping around my waist when I finally told her the truth about my parents. I could feel her thumb brushing back-and-forth on the back of my hand, reassuring me that everything is going to be okay. Her meeting my eyes and me completely becoming undone.
And I cannot feel my heart beat without the thought of her inside me. No matter what, something out there will always remind me of her. Of course, the biggest reminder of mine is our daughter - our Wendy.
I smiled at my young girl who's now becoming someone else's May, and give her away.
She was like she was.