Are You Currently Still With Your High School Sweetheart?

The question destabilizes him.

It’s been forty years and three countries since he last saw Linda. They connected on social media but her English is rusty and his Spanish more so. She had moved back to Mexico City and finished her high school there. From what he could tell, she had stayed there and had children who now have children. The other pictures are of her with girlfriends.

Sweetheart is not the right word. Girlfriend. There was nothing romantic about their getting together. He had decided he needed a girlfriend and she was the hottest available. The sentiments were sincere; he had learned a lot of Spanish, visited her twice (it was during his second visit that she had said that the long distance thing wasn’t working) but it is his ego that has the fondest memories.

He had been one of the cool kids with a bad boy side that came from transferring into the school after being asked not to return to his previous one.

He used cockiness to maintain his image. He had told his friend that you don’t get anything if you don’t try and the results are often better than you thought. One thing led to another and within a month he had started his first serious relationship.

They were sitting in an ice-cream parlour. Mark had told him he was interested in Miranda. He’d replied that he should just call her and, after spouting his two-bit wisdom, decided he needed to do a demonstration. He added that even tacky shit can work and called over the waiter.

He requested that the waiter deliver a wolf whistle to the girl he had spotted a few tables over and received a phone number in return.

“It’s probably a fake.”

The next day he was proven right and Mark was still hesitating over Miranda. That’s when he decided he would call Linda to show Mark how it was done. Not that he had any experience but the big talking required a confident follow-up.

The phone call led to a pool party. The three dunkings led to Linda putting on her swim suit. Fifteen months later it was finished.

He sometimes meets up with Mark when he goes home for a visit. Once, he remembers Mark asking “Do you remember the girl you had those two dates with when you were in college?” He is married to Debbie.

Quote of the Day

Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the corresponding part of their own bodies. The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in themselves more than any other; because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon.

“Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the corresponding part of their own bodies. The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in themselves more than any other; because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon.” — Adam Smith, “Of Sympathy,” The Theory of Moral Sentiments