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I have been sitting on a message, for a sum total of two weeks. It was delivered by my mother, seems while she and my father were supping on oysters and rose (allez la France, Euro Cup 2004) my very first love was trying to track me down.

I have been returning from work and following the usual routine, checking the mailbox for more bills, checking the answering machine, though the only calls I seem to receive are from the DNC and MCI, and staring at this number, and sort of half vaguely surprised that I didn't ring him up immediately, and three quarters wondering if I have really gotten that old, that my knees didn't verily knock in my proverbial boots at the mere mention of his name.

BC - oh yes, Before Christ. Green Dart, summertime, seventeen, he is long limbed, long fingered and long haired, and has never managed to shed his Canadian accent. He doesn't tan, he reminds me of Mick Jagger, in a good way. We made out in graveyards to the tune of Iron Maiden, gleefully disrupting the ghosts, we made out in other people's bedrooms, we made out in parks after dark, until we got busted by the cops. I am sooo giggling as I write this...

And so I rang him up.

And I got his voicemail.

And verily my knees they knocked, and I giggled onto his answering machine, and quite possibly made an ass out of myself (nothing unusual there) You know in French there were always two verbs that I was getting mixed up, the first is s'epanouir which is to blossom, and the second is s'evanouir, which is to faint. And if you were me, you would know that one can blossom and faint in the same moment without ever losing consciousness. But all that is gratuitous build up to what I felt when I heard his voicemail, not that we actually exchanged dialogue, because, fuck all, it's the digital age and... who actually speaks anymore... but, again, I digress.

And I heard his voice, and I blossomed and passed out, and I was seventeen, and none of the rest of it has happened yet, there is no thirty-three, it is beyond the scope of what I wish to contemplate. There is only my august August, BC fetching me on his motorcycle at the end of the drive as it was forbidden. There are only the haints as we skim through a dip next to the cemetery, fostering my nascent love of fast bikes and the cooling evening on my bare legs.

And in my seventeen year old certitude I will do anything, anything for him. At least until the first frenchman whispers obscenities into my ear and then I am lost, but that hasn't happened yet.

I fell in love with BC when I was in eighth grade, and plotted, planted myself strategically, made friends accordingly and finally caught the coup in the summer of my sixteenth year. The day you gave me your number was in April 1987, I was wearing a white sweatshirt and pink cut off sweatshorts (yes, it was the eighties) and in my state if unfettered ecstasy I promptly walked into the nearest pole. And I stayed in love with you, through all of the ons and offs until I was twenty one years old. But I have been following news of you as you have following news of me, because that it is what it is when you come from a small town. You knew I married and divorced and I knew you were in Las Vegas (Vegas?) with your long term girlfriend...

Your voice is unchanged, like a perfume I had nearly forgotten, potent enough to make me blossom and faint.

That must be a good thing, after so many, many years.