strange goodbye

I hadn't talked to him in a very long time. Maybe almost a decade. I knew of him still, in that way you always hear about people you once knew, home town people. I knew.

Someone I once loved died yesterday. I loved him in the most selfish of ways, knowing that no matter what I did he would love me back. I was ridiculously young and hopelessly headstrong. He was older and wiser, although I would never admit that and God knows I never listened. He had a lazy way of talking that sounded good on the phone. He called me Red and could make it sound like anything from a caress to a curse depending on the slightest change in inflection. He had a jacked up car and a mustache that made him seem like bad news and the the first night I went anywhere with him, I was so late coming home that my parents called the cops. He made me feel like a rebel.

It turned out he was more of a stabilizing force. Someone who sheltered me in a storm. And I think my parents ended up liking him more than they did me for a period of time (and I don't blame them, I was not always a pleasant teen). For years after we broke up I still knew he was there, that I could call him, that he would come and rescue me if need be... and a couple times he even did.

He loved me. He was one of a very few people with whom I never doubted that.

My world is a little more empty today.