BS”D
Sixteen or so years had passed since the last time I saw her. She and her family lived on our street in Cleveland Heights, one block down from us, or up depending on how you looked at it. Her father was the principal at one of the local Jewish day schools, and our parents had known each other for a long time. Years before they moved to Cleveland, apparently, our families spent a summer together, while both sets of parents helped run the educational departments at a popular Jewish sleep-a-way camp.
Short hair that wasn’t even a bob-cut, she played hockey in elementary school, and, according to what her father told us over one Shabbat meal at my childhood home, she could terrorize the rink.
“At one game she checked a guy on the other team, stole the puck, and drove it in for a goal. I jumped to my feet yelling, ‘THAT’S MY GIRL!’ and was met by startled looks of confusion,” he would recount.
She was as Tom as a Tom-boy could be. Hanging out with her, we would discuss Charles Barkley’s impending retirement, and then head down to the garage to look at her hockey sticks. In all honesty, back then I was still playing with Barbie dolls. If she had any of those they must have been decked out in hockey pads as well.
Winter of ’96 gave the youth of Cleveland three consecutive snow days. As it grew whiter and whiter outside, with snow eventually piling past the door of our Fisher Price playhouse (at least a foot and a half deep) I spent my free time in her front yard building snow whales, snowmen, and other various sculptures with her and her brothers. Back then I was still innocent. I vaguely recall feeling a slight tingle around her, the tiniest of inklings that she was interesting, or more correctly, that I was interested, but for the most part I was there to hang out with her two brothers. And for all intents and purpose, she was really one of the guys.
It had been sixteen years since that wonderland of a winter. Her family moved to Cincinnati a year later; one more victim of the rabbinic familial lifestyle- the constant hop up the ladder of opportunity and around the map. Over an NCSY Shabbaton a few years later I ran into her sister and father. Seeing them was nice, but there was nothing that I felt that I was missing.
Last night she made a cameo in my dreams. After years of not missing her, of barely remembering of her family, she reappeared. And somehow I recognized her. In this particular eyelid film she grabbed the lead role. For some reason the girl I held in my arms, the one who made me complete until my REM cycle ended and the sun came up, was her. Not once did she mention her name, and her father was replaced by someone with a different face, but her features were unmistakable.
I woke up lost, spending my first morning minutes trying to understand what I had just seen. Angered by the fact that I had once again held her, my one and only, in one of her many forms, only to wake up to a shadow of a memory. I craved her touch and that feeling that I had dreamed of, the one of finally allowing myself to let go, to disregard the restrictions that I took upon myself for all of these years and to finally hold and be held for the rest of my life.
Her name moved quickly from its place in a cranial pocket to the tip of my tongue. Sixteen years it lay there dormant. Sixteen years it sat biding its time. I whispered it, her full name, shocked by the fact that I could place her face so fast and that I had no doubt as to whom I had seen. How did I remember her family’s name, let alone her own name?
“It must be a sign,” I thought in my typical manner.
Before I lay myself down to sleep that particular evening, I had gone out on a blind-date with a sweet girl who was very much not my type. I was ready to move on. The regular cast of characters, the crushes that came and never seemed to go, the names that cause me to sigh with regret of having never taken a shot, had all returned to my mind. Out of all of those girls the one whose basketball cards I had drooled over was the one to haunt me. If all of these years later she had returned with such a force, then this must be a prophecy some kind.
What-ifs rushed through my brain:
“What if she moved to Israel?”
“What if she’s single?”
“What if she dreamed something similar?”
I resigned myself to making contact with her if she was living in the country, and then opened up facebook.
“How did she spell her name? Am I wrong? Did I make a mistake with her last name? I remember the first three letters for sure, let’s see what the search engine gives me. Please Marc Zuckerberg come through, this could be it.”
Quickly I scrolled through the names and faces. Nothing. I typed again, varying the spellings, changing letters, praying silently that this would come through.
Success.
Her face was the same as in the dream, her hair longer than the last time I had seen her and her eyes were brighter than I could have remembered, especially because I never recalled looking into them when I was eight years old. There was no doubt- she was the one who had haunted my sleep last night.
I looked at one picture of her and then another, and then one more. All with the pure intentions of confirming that this was indeed her.
And then he appeared.
She stood behind his chair beaming, and the comments left by her friends leave no room for mistake. She’s taken by someone else. My eyes scan the information bar at the top. She still lives in the US.
Fist and table meet. One bang then I’m done. The hour is late, and Queen Mab already lies in waiting with her dust. Tonight I will dream again, a bit heartbroken, but one step closer to the truth.
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