Someone I’ll Always See

We were kids when we met – I was barely 15, and he was 16, and we were young and head over heels.

We broke up the night before my college graduation, sitting on a bench close to the tiny lake on my college campus, and I got up the next morning and tried to act normal around his family and mine.

We were kids then, and we grew up a lot in those years together, but shared interests at 15 remain entrenched in your memories somehow, because there is something about a Renaissance festival that always makes me think of him.

We’re in different states now, and it’s been years since we have even spoken to each other aside from the very occasional email, but it doesn’t matter.

Because there is a part of me that so deeply associates him there – in hand embroidered vest or a kilt, in devil horns, with a sword – that I always expect it.

I look for him around corners. I see him in the young man in leather armor across the way, and in the boy buying a flower crown for a girl. I see him laughing at the shows and humming Greensleeves.

I walk the Faire, and he’s alway waiting around the next turn.

And I wonder – does he see me there, too?