The kind of encounter that softens the past but unsettles the present.
A ghost of my memories glided back into my life on New Year’s Eve. I offered the foreign face an awkward side hug when he eagerly approached me fresh from the bouncer’s ID check.
“You don’t know who I am?”
His voice, my favorite deep soothing tone, dropped like the Times Square ball back into my life. The high school boy I found myself in a spiraling adoration for was soon to be dancing with me like a current flame despite the decade of distance.
“Oh my God,” I yelled his name.
My stepdad mentioned I would one day notice that after ten years, people come back around; I internally rolled my eyes, realizing I am old enough to experience full-circle moments.
While I was happy to see my old obsession, looking at his now bearded face felt like opening a long-awaited package that arrived after the occasion. Shipping took more than 3,650 days for us to cross paths again.
But I turned down the heat, preventing old feelings from boiling over this New Year’s surprise. I sank into his familiar energy that was still the polar opposite of mine, and he laughed like no time had passed between us in the pizza kitchen.
Anytime I write or think about where my journey started, I am sixteen, looking at him through a metal shelf that separates the public from the ovens. I frustrated the hell out of him at work and always wiggled my way into his post-shift shenanigans—parties, poker in his friend’s treehouse, and parking lot hangouts.
“Why aren’t you married?” He asked quietly in my ear while he swayed me to the beat of the song—his arms wrapped under my red, cropped, oversized bow tank.
“I don’t know,” I said, glaring blankly at the guns blasting smoke from the DJ stage.
I was just as confused as to why I was single. But despite that burning question, when I tilted my head back on his chest and felt the music radiating around us post midnight, being husbandless and childless didn’t concern me—the fact that I was back in this town beside him did.
I pictured myself sitting on the stainless steel dough counter across from a buffet of contained pizza toppings, sipping the original black and green Monster, and boasting about the upcoming high school graduation. I knew I was attending the local community college, but after that, I would never be in this boring town.
My NYE ghost would pull a nearly burnt pizza out of the oven. Using a 2-foot rounded knife with his protruding forearm veins, he would chop rows into squares faster than a blink, sling the pizza into a brown paper bag, and place it on the warmer between us so I could hand it to the customer on the other side of the counter.
My job was simple, but something he could not do—talk and smile.
To my frustration, he planned to move out of state for a year of aimless college adventures. Knowing my undiagnosed anxiety better than me, he once peeked under the shelf and looked into my eyes deeply—
“In a year, I am going to be back here working with you,” he said as if it were a promise.
Unfortunately, it was. A year after doing who knows what in Missouri, he clocked in the week I was packed up to move to another state for university.
A year without him felt like a quarter slice of pizza pulled from my heart. I ate that shit—said no thank you for seconds.
We spent a couple of shifts unable to communicate.
The whole pizza burned.
My mental health: haywire.
I used to know half the people in any local bar. Now, I run into past twenty-year-old students calling me Ms. Stolfa. I kissed him in the middle of the dance floor—the teenager in me screaming, finally feeling our synchronized lips communicate for the first time, and very well. Everything unsaid forgiven. It was a peaceful yet public bliss far better than I could have imagined.
He felt like home.
I closed my eyes in the arms that once made slicing pizza sexy and wished we could keep the minds we have now, yet still be the age of those dancing around us.