Love in a flash

By Merle Harton, Jr.

Abby and I were in love for six months. That was as long as it lasted, short but hot, like the flame of gunpowder. We made love on the floor in my apartment in front of the 13-inch television where we had been watching a video of Phenomenon. The floor wasn't my first choice, but the bed was only a single and I had no sofa. After my divorce, all I had was a rented apartment in Covington, Louisiana, the television, the single bed, a dining table, three computers, a stereo system, and a 1976 2-door Buick LeSabre with chipped paint and a bad transmission. Abby loved me in spite of it all. She was tall, a natural blonde, a fitness trainer who could have been a model. She was also a Christian and I think we both struggled over the sex part, but I think, too, we planned to be together for a long time and making love seemed so very natural for us. We did that often. She finally brought me her futon, from the back of a friend's pickup truck. Occasionally she spent the night, but she always left early in the morning before I got up.

In addition to the love making, which was good, we talked a lot. That was good, too. Abby was the only woman I remember ever talking so openly with, or felt free to talk openly with. Our first telephone conversations went on for about 3 hours each night. It was like high school again and I was in love for the first time. I was then 46 and she was 30, and we could talk for 3 hours each night. She lived in Hammond, about 25 miles away, and we didn't realize the cost of the toll calls until the end of the first month, and then we just spent more time together. We also wrote letters to each other. Mostly email, because that took less time and there's a pleasant immediacy to email. It also enabled us to type, so we didn't have to struggle with the tedium of the handwritten note. I was elegant and prolific and wrote some of my best love letters. They were poetic and lyrical and sweet and all the things that make love letters clever. She would write me back little darling pieces, always signing them with just the lower-case letter "a" and a period.

She had never married. From grade school through high school she was in a girls' boarding school and always felt that something was missing from her emotional development as a result. Her parents were divorced and she was reminded of the pain of that event whenever my children came over. She saw in their faces an emotion that I could not see. She told me this one night and cried. Eventually that pain became for her unbearable and she said that we couldn't see each other anymore. She took a job out of state and I never saw her again. She sent me a Christmas card at the end of the year. It arrived with postage due.

The New Quaker (Fiction): "Love in a flash"
Copyright © 2006 Merle Harton, Jr.  All rights reserved
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