I wrote two days ago of walking along the beach where Buffalo and I first kissed and spent many wonderful days together. I am aware that I haven’t yet recorded the circumstances of that first kiss.
It’s an odd tradition, this writing of memoirs. My public actions comprise the reason why anyone might care that I tell my life story, and yet the reader feels cheated if the memoir doesn’t delve into my private life.
Not that I don’t understand or acknowledge the connection. We are not compartmentalized machines; we are unique and whole individuals. The face we present in public is the same face that stares us in the mirror in the privacy of our homes; our soul does not change between public arena and private quarters.
I, Raymond Douglas Kaliber, would not be “The” Raymond Douglas Kaliber without the remarkable human being named Buffalo Springsteen, her insights and encouragement – as well as the many ways she touched my heart that will always remain private, obligation to the reader be damned, thank you.
But there came a time when the need to kiss those beautiful lips could no longer remain unfulfilled, and I love to share this part of our story, so:
A few weeks had gone by since the day she first said, “I’d love to,” before I’d had a chance to invite her out. Our times together had been stimulating and fun and challenging. This was not even the first time we had walked along that beach, but something felt different this day – different, and yet as familiar as my very life.
I often feel a special sense of peace along that beach near the oxygen generator. A vast machine designed to create just the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen to sustain human life, the imagination-fueled generator can have an intoxicating effect if you wander too close. Perhaps that is the biochemical explanation why I felt an inordinate joy walking next to this woman: The additional jolt of oxygen simply made me more receptive to the pheromones she was discharging in my direction.
Or perhaps it was the visual clues of the spark in her eyes or the glint of the red shining sun off her scarlet-tinged hair. Or the way she laughed at my feeble attempts at humor. Or the part of her lips.
Oh, we had kissed before – a little peck at the end of a day or evening together. But this moment, we wanted to drink of that wine more deeply. Something in the moment, the look in her eyes, what we had been saying to each other, just said, “Now.”
I’d love to tell you exactly what clever things we had been saying to each other that made the moment right. I’d love to explain how the tilt of her head gave me permission to let my lips linger and press harder against hers. Truth be told, the only thing I remember about the moment is the sense of certainty that this was the time when we were to become something other than teacher and student, something other than friends or colleagues, something more like one soul, one flesh.
And so it was. Everything changed in that moment, and yet everything had always been this way. I have no memory of living apart from Buffalo Springsteen, and yet I have plenty of memories from a time before that moment. It’s just I can no longer imagine a time when I was not a part of her, and she a part of me.
I never again needed to imagine what freedom feels like.
Special entry: Independence Day
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