May the Circle Be Unbroken, Chapter 3 Her Hardest Hue to Hold

He had said, "Maybe someday". That vague promise of a possible future together haunted her 15 years later even though he was an ocean and a continent away. Here she was, right where she had always wanted to be in an old-fashioned German house, with a steady, loving relationship and even a cat. At the age of 37 and after a long losing streak, she was finally in a relationship with a man who actually wanted a child and would make a good father. She was living in a country she had always wanted to live in permanently and she had achieved her goal of earning a degree from a German university. Why then was she still pining away for her first love?

She missed his quiet presence. She missed feeling the vibration of his voice in his chest when she lie in his arms, especially when he was singing to her. She missed the way he smelled and the way he walked. She missed his long fingered artist’s hands. She missed saying his name. There was something about his name. She liked elongating the O and exaggerating the r at the end into almost a purr. She missed the fact that he well outweighed her. She missed his muscle mass and the solidness of him. She missed the fact that he could pick her up without any strain. She missed that he wouldn’t even kill a fly or a spider, but would somehow usher them outside.

Sadly enough, whenever she had the flu, a fever or some piece of particularly bad news, whenever she felt the world caving in on her, the only respite was to imagine herself in his arms.

Love doesn’t end just because you no longer see the person. This was still a painful truth to experience.

They had met when she was 17, right before her 18th birthday. They were both freshmen in college and lived in the same dorm. They had many of the same classes. She was nervously sitting in Western Civilization class on that first morning of the first day of classes. She was still getting used to life in the US again. She had come back from a high school exchange year in Ulm, Germany less than a month previously. She had learned more in one year at her German Gymnasium than she had learned in her 3 years of American High School. She missed Germany and missed speaking German.

And then, she heard his voice. The theme song of their relationship would much more aptly be titled, “The first time ever I heard your voice” instead of “saw your face". He raised his hand from the very back of the room, where he was almost hidden from view. He was called on by the professor and made such an insightful and unusual comment about Sophocles’s Antigone that it made her pause and it was then that the wave came crashing down upon her. That salty, choking wave of love at first sight or in this case, hear. She wished it had all been somehow exaggerated in her memory, but it wasn’t. She would much later in life read rave reviews of his portrayal of Creon, the tragic hero of Antigone, in a stage production of the play. None of his rave reviews and the accolades for his voice especially would ever surprise her.

Anything sounded better when said in his deep, resonating voice. He could read the phone book aloud and it would sound somehow profound.

Especially after a year in super liberal Germany, where everyone she had met seemed to make an effort to not be racist after lessons beat into their skulls about the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust and Nazi brutality; she simply did not even consider the fact that he was African-American and she was white.

She had grown up in a lower middle class predominately African-American neighborhood until age 14 and he, as she would come to find out, had grown up in an affluent predominately white neighborhood. She supposed years later that they had given each other the acceptance and love the other had craved since their childhood. Being seen as beautiful and more than good enough by a member of a group which had often rejected you was pretty heady stuff.

He was and would always be so very handsome to her. The same features that earned him jibes and racial taunts in both the white and the black community of the American South were so beautiful to her. They were beautiful to her because they were his. They were the physicality that encased his old, kind soul. Later in life, she would have a problem with people assuming she had a "thing" for black men because of her love for him. But, no one seemed to get it. She just had a "thing" for him. She had a "thing" for his heart and his brain.

He was dark skinned with pronounced African features and a large, solid, muscled build. He shaved his head in his teens and early twenties and had a tendency to wear sweatshirts with the sleeves cut out and a key on a cord around his neck. He almost always wore sneakers and baggie jeans.

Memories of him were still seared into her brain. Answering the door to her dorm room at night after a timid knock and opening the door to see him standing there. His weight shifted to one side with his right hand clutching the key of the cord around his neck. His sculpted shoulders and arms which he somehow possessed without needing to work out or lift weights would show due to his lack of sleeves. He would always look down or to the side and was so shy when talking to her. He smelled so good. She remembers the sensory overload which assaulted her whenever she was in his presence.

She would seek him out nearly everyday and would use any flimsy excuse to be around him. They started studying together, though it was more than difficult for her to concentrate. She remembers sitting next to him on a couch in the study lounge, reading the same paragraph in her open book over and over again, without ever really even getting the gist.

One night at the end of September, she finally had the nerve to say something to him. Had it been the 21^st night of September? They were alone in her dorm room using the excuse of looking through her CD collection as an excuse to be alone together. She was kneeling on the hard wood floor, as her CDs were on a low shelf. He was standing next to her. She kept her eyes averted and suddenly blurted out, "I am really attracted to you. I really like you. I don’t know what to do." He paused and said, "Me too." Neither of them had ever kissed anyone or ever had a first date or a boyfriend or girlfriend. She had been quite the wall flower in junior high and high school, and the white girls at his schools and in his neighborhood had been too afraid of breaking the unspoken social code of the American South by going out with him.

He said, "I don’t know what to do either. I guess we should have a first date." She smiled and exhaled and remembers trembling, she was so nervous. "OK", she said.

They quickly figured out that their presence as a couple anywhere public was problematic at best. When they walked down the main street of bars and coffee shops and music and book stores every college has, she would hear young white men saying things like, "Damn, and she’s cute, too." in disgust and sheer surprise.

A traditional dinner and a movie date just wasn’t much fun. You had to get through the stares and comments on your way to the restaurant and then you had to negotiate the nervousness of the waiter or waitress. The movie was only fun once you were safely to your seats, well away from any other in the audience and after the lights were out. They found themselves ordering pizzas in and watching movies on VHS. His roommate’s girlfriend had a single room and this basically meant that he had no roommate. So, they mostly spent the first semester of their freshman year in his dorm room. She would lie in his room for hours in his arms, looking up at the moon. There was no where she would rather be and quite frankly, if she could return to that place and time with that man, she would. She still felt this way twenty years later, a score of her life having come and gone. They only surfaced to go to class and somehow miraculously still made good grades. Her best friend would tell her later that their hermit like existence was quite the butt of gossip and fellow students used to giggle or guffaw into their hands which would suddenly shoot up over their mouths when he and she would finally enter a classroom.

Their first real date ended up being an ordered in pizza and then just sitting on the back veranda of the old Southern red brick and white wood plantation style house that served as their dorm. Night had fallen and they sat on the floor of the veranda on the slightly chilly night of a full moon. She sat with her head on his shoulder. He recited Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 better known as, "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" to her and then she got the overwhelming urge to kiss him. With impeccably bad timing, Hugh, a fellow student, saw them on the veranda and came over to say hi. He seemed to be able to sense that he was intruding on a moment and soon left. She turned to him and said she wanted to kiss him, but that she had never kissed anyone before. He replied, "Me either", umm, I guess we should just try it out." She timidly closed her eyes and pressed her lips softly against his. They kissed and felt that electric surge of first love and first love’s first kiss. It was intoxicating to say the least. "Wow, this is really fun", she goofily exclaimed and they just kept kissing and kissing. She remembers the grey and black sweater he was wearing against the chill in the air and that it was some sort of scratchy, synthetic blend that she wanted to get off of him as soon as humanly possible.

It got to the point at which it would have been embarrassing if someone had come along the path to the right of the veranda and had seen them. They went up to his room and lie in each other arms on his narrow, uncomfortable dorm bed looking up at the full moon through his dormer style window. She asked him to take his t-shirt off. He always seemed to wear a t-shirt or undershirt and he had yet to take it off in her presence. He certainly had nothing to hide or feel embarrassed about. His effortlessly sculpted chest and arms could be used in a motivational after picture for a workout regiment or machine. She just wanted to feel her skin on his. He reluctantly complied, blurting out, "You aren’t expecting us to have sex already, are you?" He was a virgin as was she. She really wasn’t ready for that either and she assured him that she just wanted to be able to feel the warmth of his skin on her own when she was lying in his arms. He was one of those rare men who can only make love, not have meaningless sex. She would realize the value of this rare gift in him again and again over the years when comparing him to other members of his sex.

She couldn’t remember ever being happier than in that moment, lying in his warm, solid arms, with her cheek pressed against the bulk of his chest, listening to his heart beat, staring up at the moon. She never wanted that moment to end and wanted to somehow save it in her memory banks forever. For better and a whole lot of worse, she had succeeded.

He would often sing to her when they would lie together like that. He would sing old jazz standards like My One and Only Love or I’ve got you under my skin. His voice was so mesmerizing, comforting, and addicting. She would sing to him and as many would tell her through out her life, she could really carry a tune. She would sing childhood songs like Somewhere over the Rainbow or songs like The Rose, which were meant for much older women, but which she had sung as a girl, while her father accompanied her on the guitar. The songs they sang to each other revealed how they viewed their relationship and their realistic prospects for a future together. She was somewhere in “Lalaland” well over the rainbow and he was trying to resist the voice screaming in his ear that he needed to wake up to reality, that he never could win, but the thought of her still kept him from stopping before he began to end things, at least for the time being. She always had until he had finished singing, until the end of that last verse. She always somehow sensed the fragile, fleeting quality of the exquisite oneness and sheer joy he brought her. That nothing gold can stay is a reality of life on planet earth that was, for her, the hardest to come to terms with. And, he, her first love, remained her hardest hue to hold.