The Red Skirt (Portrait of a Woman)

I once knew a girl, and we once fell in love. Hopelessly, madly in love. It was lovely and promising but it was high school romance and we knew what was coming. She dreamt of Europe; I, of education. We loved well and said goodbye.

I went to school and I waited a year. I danced with a few, kissed a few less, dated one, and cried most nights for that silly girl that was lost wandering across a million different grounds. I wrote to her, she wrote back, I wrote some more, and she told me she was staying. I graduated a time after that. I found another love. A white picket fence and a career and a wife and children.

This morning, I woke up with tears across my face and goosebumps across my body. I felt familiar. I didn't want to remember. It hurt, the way I missed those summer dresses and that beautiful voice. But I remembered everything.

I remember how she used to change her clothes to match her mood. Invincible and angry, she was wearing old band tees and sneakers half laced. Clothed in baby pink lace and she was dreamy and introspective. Romantic and hopeful meant the red skirt and a scarf around her hair. Her voice carried the silhouette of angels and her roughened feet carried her farther than my safe ones ever traveled.
I remember she had a constant need for thought, in a way I never understood. She was cold all the time, but warm when I held her. She was a dancer and a lover and a writer and a thinker.

I remember she had rough hands. Rough and dry, strong and elegant. Her nails were never all the same length and she never took the ring off her fourth finger that she said reminded her of how her parents used to love each other. Her hands were alive with character and full of love. Sometimes they talked more than she did. When she was nervous, they would fidget and when she was angry they became tense. When she was compassionate, her hands healed. If she loved you, those hands were like pictures of her soul.

She was almost always barefoot. I remember from that first night. She walked out of the back door with a t-shirt and some gray shorts, jumping on summer-tanned toes.

That was the summer we fell in love. I, all intellectual and a secret romantic, and her, all free-spirited and lovable. We fell in the heat of passion and spent autumn thick with promise and warmth.
I remember that hardly a day passed that I failed to kiss her. We loved each other with every moment of the day, every breath that we breathed. It was deep and promising and I trusted it to the point that it often terrified me.

I remember how I was terrified that we were too intense for each other. We were different, so different, but yet similar in such a way that we connected more than I thought we would. I remember how we used to sit for hours and bounce around these introspective evaluations and conversations that no one except us could follow.

And I remember the day we said goodbye. She wore that damned red skirt, the one that graced her hips like a gentle kiss. I remember how she whispered that there was more for us, that there was so much to learn, so much more for which to live. I remember when I kissed her for the last time and her wet lashes left a stain upon my cheek. She walked into that tiny gray tube that was going to take her into the sky, into Europe, into the world, and left me lonely on the airport floor.

It's been 20 years now and I see it all before me just as I did when I saw her walk away into that airplane tunnel. I see it again as if from my 18 year old brain. And I wish, God, I wish. I wish I had followed that red skirt in.