Happy Birthday Boo

Oh my god I am back again...
This rain shit has got me trapped in my house and this is a no good situation , me and rainy weather have problems to begin with, forget about on a blue mood day. I have done just about everything that a person can do and absolutely nothing all at the same time...I am avoiding the real work, like cleaning - I think I would rather drive the end of thumb tacks up under my nail beds, which btw, I did my nails and Emma's in our new 'crackle blue' - like I said everything and nothing. ugh.
I surfed in itunes in desperate need of new music and found nothing that peaked my interest at all, except for an old Jackson 5 song "I wanna be where you are" - GOD I love that song - used to request it on KISS 108 back in Boston all the damn time....I miss that song and I need it, but to buy it you have to buy the entire album which is like forty bucks. I am all set with that and so I have put out a status update on facebook hoping someone here in Fluvie has it.
I roamed around my house in my comfy sweatshirt, looking for a good place to plop and landed here on my bed. Then I remembered...It's Omar's birthday today - he would be forty one.
What I do not need today is a trip down memory lane, but yeah off my mind went back to 1986....
What a beautiful love affair we had - and with that. fucking more salty tears - All I can say is Thank God I am not hormonal right now, because ovulatory rage would be really an unfortunate ingredient to add to the already perfect recipe for a nervous breakdown.
I thought about my boo - couldn't help myself.
And there we were before my eyes in the dark shade of my lonely bedroom - we were in the clawfoot tub back in the apartment in Belmont - no one was home - we were in a bubble bath together, him between my legs while I washed his hair, piled it high in a soapy beehive - he looked like the bride of Frankenstein. We did that a lot, the bath thing - I washed his hair all the time for him, deep conditioned it to try to heal the damage of too much hairspray - yes I said hairspray - it was the 80's and he was a 'metal head' - he used more hairspray than me. Those were really good days - we had a lot of really great quiet, private moments that I will cherish until the day I die.
We talked a lot and touched while we talked. Arms tangled, heads resting on each other, finger tips touching, quick thumb wrestle, fingers entwined, laughter a good neck bite. We were very happy then.
I find that now, all these years later, when I look at my own sons who are in that same stage of life that we were in back in the tub, it's hard for me to see my kids in a love affair of that caliber, hard for me to imagine them in that kind of quiet intimacy.
Omar and I were like and old married couple from the first time we kissed, we settled into a routine that felt older than our ages combined. It was as if we had been lovers before somewhere in the cycle of time and that 1986 was starting us off at our golden anniversary or something - old souls in young bodies.
Strange to imagine that intimacy now, strange for my finger tips to be unable to find his, still lonely for them after all these years.
When we finished our bath, which was when the water was too cold to stand it anymore and our skin had literally turned elderly - we would hold each other in towels and cuddle for warmth, lay on our bed - his wet, black hair splayed across the pillow case, getting the linens sopping wet. I would sit him up just like back in the tub, between my legs and comb his long hair out with all the gentleness of a Mother to her child. But like a lover more than a Mother, because usually the drying and bare skin and the sensuality of the hair brushing led us to getting tangled up in love making and there went any plans we had of real productivity.
For us, productivity occurred in our conversations, it occurred in our eyes when we stared into each other and said absolutely nothing at all. We enjoyed being alone, we enjoyed the quiet, we enjoyed simplicity of just doing absolutely nothing-together.
I remember when he painted me in the velvet arm chair in the living room - we ate Kentucky Fried chicken and listened to Journey and I complained that I couldn't sit still, he told me to shut up and quit my bitching - sit my ass still. He smiled at me then from around the side of the canvas and I threw a chicken bone at him and he said, "missed loser" and he smiled again around the canvas and mouthed the words "I love you" with a sparkle in his eyes and his lips closed in his 'I'm sorry I am teasing you' side smile.
I love you too.
And here come the fucking tears again, Jesus.
He was beautiful, one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen in my life, still to this very day. His father was from Iraq and he inherited his Fathers strong features and dark skin - his skin was so soft and taut and warm. He had the MOST beautiful hands I have ever seen, perfect hands, long fingers, perfect nails - clean and gently calloused on the tips from his base guitar strings. Gentle hands, hands that made music and smoothed hair, traced the shape of my lips ever so slowly. His eyes were always behind his hair except for when his hair was wet or when I gathered it in a high bun on top of his head like a samurai warrior - then he looked like a little boy - his eyes twinkled all the time, like the whites were littered with flecks of glitter - his brown eyes were the color of good chocolate. My favorite thing about his face were his lips, most likely because his smile could settle any disagreement and smooth any of my ruffled feathers instantly - that, and he had a little ball of flesh that protruded right on the underside of his upper lip, directly in the middle. He would bite it, I would bite it - I would kiss it all the time when he had his mouth open and he least expected me to pounce, something about that little ball of lip that put me right over the edge of desire.
His lips were a great shape, they were adorable when he spoke.
He was so dark and had such long dark hair and he was always in black leather and people assumed he was a bad ass and I put emphasis on the bad there.
He was the kindest, most gentle spirit I have ever known - he took care of me in a way that I have never felt again.
He was completely perfect in my eyes and I always thought that we would return to each other and live forever.
I have a sneaking suspicion that he knew better.
Two months before he died, he came to me under the apple trees one afternoon - he told me that he was miserable - he wanted to move to Cali and apply to art school out there - he produced his Mother's emerald ring and asked me to go with him.
I should have said yes - but, I didn't... When we sat together on a park bench in Harvard Sq. a few weeks later, my legs over his, holding his hand that read BLADE across the knuckles - his Johnny to my Rio the red head - we discussed our love affair and why it had happened we decided to take a break and date other people - when it was we would end up back together for life? He talked about the cowboy boots his Mother still wanted to buy for our baby, we laughed like we had all the time in the world - but again he said with urgency, "please come to California Boo" and I again, said I couldn't go - had to graduate, had to do one thing right...
The day he died, he had called me and I called him back on my way out the door to work - he was in the shower - his Mom on the cordless stood in the doorway to the bathroom, I can still hear the water running and his voice, "No tell her to wait, I have to talk to her it's important" - and me late as usual "I gotta go, tell him I'll talk to him tonight."
I stood in the shoe store where I worked, Xanadu it was called, and I stared at the huge neon clock on the wall and felt as though my insides had frozen solid inside of me - I believe now, it was the moment his lungs filled with water and left no room for air.
I was most upset that I didn't get to wash his hair - that custom is reserved for the Father - that, and that I didn't hang on my end of the phone for thirty more seconds.
The day of his funeral I got out of the car and my hands twisted up like an old witches, fingers gnarled and couldn't unwind - my first real panic attack.
As I walked away from the grave stumbling on earth that now held on to the body that made love to me, the boys from the band handed me a notebook full of songs and poems and doodles and sketches about me.
A piece of me died as I opened it up and looked for the first time at words and pictures I never knew existed - I remember thinking, oh Jesus what is happening?
It was the beginning of a very dark period of my life that I have maybe only just now in the last few years come out of. I lost track of the girl who washed his hair, I lost track of the girl who knew what real love was.
I know that he is profoundly happy to find me healthy again after all these years - he has a hand in every good thing I do for myself - I feel him push me along when my own stubbornness makes me hold my ground for no apparent stupid misguided reason.
The medium who stumbled into my store one day, pulled by a young man with dark hair and eyes that needed her to say the word Worchester to me, confirmed he is over my right shoulder, stuck to me like glue always.
I can feel hm smiling back there right now I think.
Young love with us was old love - He would be forty one today and I wish so much I could see him with salt and pepper hair -
He told me once as I thrashed in fear - "I will never leave you."
Sometimes I think it was a conscious choice to leave me here in this place, to never leave my side again....
The line that divides his world and mine feels so thin to me, like I could poke right through it and touch him -
Today I wish I could slap him on the ass forty one times and tell him he's an old man now....Instead I am the old broad and he is still eighteen.
Happy Birthday my love - I love you forever and a day.