Summoning it back

It was good to talk to her. How long has it been... Three years, perhaps. Time just flows so quickly. Life is just a quick drop by, really. Maybe I'm old. I remember the long afternoons of my childhood, running up and down the hills, and even so trying to enjoy every last minute before the darkness fell and I had to go home to take a bath and have dinner, and then the summer was a day shorter. These afternoons do not exist anymore. Even when I play golf on the weekends, the afternoon is much shorter than it once was, as if it becomes more and more diluted in time. God, I really look older now, the grey hair is everywhere, the wrinkles and old skin... The body I once had is now gone, this belly came to replace it. I wonder how Gina looks today. Perhaps it's better not to think about it, to just keep the memory of how great she looked then. Maybe time was not as relentless to her; but again, she is a redhead... I used to love her pale skin, the way she looked like a ghost in the dark, all whitish and almost glowing. She could barely go out on sunny days, her skin didn't take long to get all red. She hated that, she hated being so pale. She wanted to be a dark brunette, with olive skin. Women, they are never happy with how they look. That time, one night, when she asked me if she was pretty, very embarrassed, when we walked back to our homes. When was it? We must have been fifteen, I guess. Before anything else happened, when we were still just neighbors. I had never said to a girl that she was beautiful before. I had said to girls that they were pretty, that they were looking good, but never like that night, when I stopped and whispered, not because I meant to whisper but because my voice disappeared, ``You are very beautiful.'' I don't know, even today, where that question came from. I guess I realized she was serious, she really was worried that she might not look good. She told me later that she had a crush on Joe, who didn't even acknowledge her existence. If I knew that that night, I probably would have just said a ``Sure'' and nothing else would have happened. But when I stopped and said that, I felt my stomach disappear, and she looked down, embarrassed. I kissed her, she kissed me. We then walked back to our houses, not saying another word until we said good night. It seems that it happened a million years ago, in another life, but I remember everything as well as if it had happened last night.

Talking to her brings back this feeling. Makes me feel young again, forget my aching back and my high cholesterol, brings back the memory of that first kiss. I think that is why we call each other, every now and then, to hear our voices and remember the moonless but starry night, when a little kiss could change our lives.