The best true lovestory (:

It was late February in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and I was there as a result of being stationed in Great Lakes (commonly referred to as “Great Mistakes”), Illinois, a naval training station for new sailors. A friend and I were at a pool hall we frequented, not because either of us could really play pool, but because it was smoky and a little seedy and seemed to us like the kind of place “cool” people hung out.

I first noticed her outside, amidst a gaggle of friends, as we approached the place. I couldn’t tell right away if she was good-looking or not, only that she was laughing - it was a giggle really - and I loved the way it sounded. Like she was really having fun, like she enjoyed being herself.

When I finally got her attention in the pool hall, it was the same way. She gave me the impression that she was really happy, that she was comfortable in her own skin; she had good reason to be, I think. She was beautiful in a way that made you think of nature, whereas I was gaudy and still “trying to find myself” in a way that made you think of too much MTV. Later, she would confess to me that she was so interested in me because I was “different,” a comment which I never knew quite how to take. In retrospect, those were very avant-garde (see: pathetic) years for me, fashionably-speaking.

I almost left the pool hall that night without saying a word to her, despite our mutual oogling. Outside, in what was a veritable blizzard (or seemed so to me as a native Californian), my friend chastised me from behind the doors of his locked sedan: “If you don’t go back in there and talk to her I’m not letting you in. She was eye-fucking you all night you idiot.”

"Come on dude, let me in. It’s fucking cold."
"Go back in there you pussy. What do you have to lose?"

I was cold and wet and the “blizzard” was picking up in a way that made me think of the Abominable Snowman so I relented. I mean, what did I have to lose? (Aside from my balls, if I kept standing there in the freezing cold all night).

When I walked back into the pool hall she and her friends regarded me and there was a moment where - full of utter, dear-in-the-headlights terror - I was prepared to bolt again, but I took a deep breath. One of her friends (who would later be known as “Charlotte,” a fat, loud-mouthed Danish girl of emphatic anti-American sentiment) whispered into her ear as I approached. I cleared my throat and spoke the words that will quite possibly go down in history as the worst pick-up line ever:

“Hi. Do you speak English?”

She chuckled a little bit and it was the start of something great.

-

We exchanged numbers and it took nearly five weeks for us to finally go on a date. It was 2003, the day the United States invaded Iraq. We sat in an Applebee’s and watched in disbelief as the country carried out what President Bush called the “disarming of weapons of mass destruction” a topic which, despite its talking points, would’ve made for disastrous first-date dinner talk, especially with a German. I was actually in the military, after all.

When it came time for dinner I ordered a coke and a big steak dinner, while she only had a small milkshake. It made me feel terribly American and it was the first sign that we were about to cross a huge cultural divide, my country with its gluttony and capitalism, hers with, well, the bratwurst and beer? God, I was clueless then.

After dinner we hugged and what followed was a series of dates in Kenosha, Wisconsin in coffee shops and restaurant-chain eateries where we started to realize that despite our cultural differences, we agreed on a lot of things in life. I still remember our first kiss. We were sitting in her house mom’s Tahoe, looking out at the lake and staring at each other in oblique moonlight.

“Can I ask you something and you won’t laugh?” I asked.
“Ja. I promise.”
“Is it okay to kiss you yet, on this date? I mean, in your country?”
She laughed, but there was no meanness in it.
“I was thinking: when is he gonna do it!?”

So we kissed. It was the best kiss I’ve ever had. She did this thing with her eyes where the lashes fluttered. At first I thought it was something she learned from watching too many old romance movies, the way she kissed, but it was natural. She kissed me in a way that made me feel like she should’ve been the one in Casblanca. We got to know that Tahoe intimately during that summer. Once, after sex, with her cheeks ruddy and her eyes fluttering at me, she said, “It’s just like in your American movies.”
“What is?”
“Us. In the backseat with the windows fogged up. I always wanted to do this.”

-

What followed was the best seven months of my life. That summer in Wisconsin and Chicago was the last summer of my real youth. We went skinny dipping in the lake, in another au pair’s pool. We went to concerts in downtown Chicago and stayed at boutique hotels and went thrift store shopping. We were young and in love and when things got lost in translation, when she couldn’t figure out how to explain something in English, we’d shrug it off and be content with the fact that we loved one another and that was enough.

-

Like all good things, it came to an end. By the end of the summer I had new orders to proceed to Ft. Gordon, Georgia for training. She had to return to Germany. We spent our last two weeks in September at my home in California, with my family and friends. At the airport in Chicago, where we said good-bye, we made love in a cheap hotel room. It was the only time I’ve ever made love to someone and it was a sad kind of lovemaking. In the morning I was so sad that I couldn’t cry. It didn’t hit me until I was in Georgia in my shitty barracks room, alone with old polaroids and a mix CD she’d made me for my birthday. I cried so hard.

We had agreed that carrying on the relationship was not really possible. We were both pragmatists and mature enough to realize this, even then.

-
We talked now and then on the telephone. Little by little we drifted apart. She had kissed a guy on New Year’s eve. I immersed myself in the Internet and became antisocial. At some point it broke down and we stopped talking altogether; I think she had moved to France by then. Sometime in April 2004 I started having sex with an older woman and that took my mind off of her for awhile. In May I moved to Sicily, Italy and began another sexual relationship with a young girl. Then one day, after listening to the mix CD, I decided to e-mail her. I never thought she’d respond.

But she did. And she had left France and was going to school in Denmark. We talked on the phone and eventually she visited me; I even paid for the ticket, despite my philandering with several girls. We had a great time together, even after a year apart. She wouldn’t say “I love you” though, even when we were at the airport saying good-bye again. I’d told her I’d come to Germany for Christmas and visit her and meet her family. I didn’t. She didn’t talk to me for years.

-

So I moved on. I was in a relationship for a year and a half, but it was just terrible. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I’d lie in bed wondering what she was doing at that exact moment in time. I tortured myself over what could’ve been if I had went to Germany. If I hadn’t been so immature, what could’ve been. I e-mailed her and waited. Sometimes I’d get a half-assed response. A few lines that let me know she was alive. Mostly I never got anything. I’d try to call her and I’d get a “THIS NUMBER HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED” message, only in Danish and making no fucking sense. That’s when I really stopped trying. There is nothing more soul-crushing than when you hear that mechanical bitch on the other end of the line telling you that you fucked up so bad that not even the number’s there anymore. And in a fucking language you don’t understand. It’s really just the worst.

-

Over the years I’d still get the mass e-mails though. I was there at the end of her e-mail list, maybe by accident, maybe not. They were perfunctory e-mails that everyone got, so it wasn’t anything for me to open the champagne over. It was still slightly reassuring. I latched onto hope where I could find it.

It was 2006 when I spent a summer of total debauchery in Virginia Beach having what I will refer to as a “sexual awakening” (read: sex, nightclubs, alcoholic haze, sex, sex, sex). Somewhere at the end of that journey I picked up the phone and decided to call her because I thought it’d been long enough, hadn’t it? And wasn’t I over her by now? I had tried to prove that to myself in a lot of ways.

She was shocked that it was me. It was a strange conversation, one that left me feeling slightly giddy. She still had the uncanny ability to give me butterflies. She was living in Bremen, Germany now, but moving to Montepellier, France for the ERASMUS programme. She was going on a date, just as I was calling, too. We had a conversation like this, exchanging tidbits about our lives over the last two years. We didn’t talk about our relationship or “love” or anything. I hung up feeling empty, but a week later I sent her a long, I-still-care-about-you e-mail. Her response went something like, “I care about you too, but I’m not waiting for you,” and “It took a long time to get over you and now I am and I’m happy.”

-

The following year I went on deployment for six months. There is a quote, by e.e. cummings - “for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)/ it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” - that best describes that time in my life. When you’re out at sea there is nothing but you and your thoughts chasing you around in your head. You have a lot of time to think about your life. You realize what is important. You regret. You dream. You yearn. You really find yourself and it’s not sappy or anything. It just is.

She was the only person who kept in contact with me that year while I was out at sea. When you’re alone like that you really need a strong support base and she was it. She didn’t even realize it. We exchanged over a hundred e-mails during that time and sometimes she’d write me something romantic after one-too-many glasses of wine; I’d come back from a port city drunk out of my mind and do likewise. People are most honest when they are drunk. I know this.

I started to teach myself German. As it neared the end of my deployment (October 2007) I started to get a little forward. I had the opportunity to take some vacation and I kept thinking about who I wanted to spend that time with. I had my family, but there was a chance that I could spend it with her. And well why not go there, without any presumption or expectation, as a friend? So I told her I wanted to see her and I told her that I’d been teaching myself German because, as I wrote, “it’s a sign of respect for one person to speak in another’s native language. I want to do that with you and your friends and your family. I think it’s important.”

She nearly cried on the phone.

-

It was the first time I had ever been to Germany. I was the last one to get my luggage because I spent something like twenty minutes in the bathroom grooming myself after a grueling fourteen-hour flight. I hadn’t seen her in over three years. I had to try my best to look at least presentable.

She shared a tiny three-bedroom flat with a girl and a guy. We ate fresh fruit at her small table and I took a shower and went to take a nap while she went to run errands. Halfway through my nap I woke up to the sensation of her body next to mine. I turned over and looked at her sleepily.

“I was on my bicycle and I was halfway to the post office and then I realized: he is here. He is finally here. What am I doing?”
She put her arms around me and we held each other hard and close for a long moment.
“I came back as fast as I could to be with you.”

We kissed and later we made love and everything between us was just beautiful. Everything finally felt right in my life.

-

As I write this, Stefanie is tanning on the balcony. We are staying in a penthouse in Pacific Beach, California overlooking the ocean and everything does finally feel right in my life. She just received her bachelor’s and I just completed six years of service in the Armed Forces. She’s been visiting for three weeks and I begin classes in the fall. We have visited each other three different times since last October and every time was just wonderful. My family - but more particularly, my father - was ecstatic to know that she was back in my life again. When I first let my Dad know I was going to visit her that October, rather than my family, he reacted not with hurt, but with joy: “I’m so glad for you. You should definitely go and have a great time with her.”
“Really? You’re not mad that I’m not coming home?”
“We can see you in December. What’s important is that you see her again.”
“Yeah, but I’m trying not to get my hopes up about anything. I just want to go there and have a good time and see her again.”
“Then go. I always thought she was the one for you. Just so you know.”
“You did?”
“Ever since I met her. She’s a great girl, Raymond. Don’t screw this up.”
“I know. She’s the only real lady I’ve ever met.”
Later, when we went to visit my family in December Stefanie got more presents than I did. That was such bull! But at least it was a great sign that my family still loved her.

When we originally split up, due to the distance, we always told one another that when we were both done with our mutual obligations - mine in the service, hers in university - that we’d try to reconnect and see if the pieces still fit. And despite all the years apart, like an old jigsaw puzzle, we still remember how to put the pieces back together. We fit now better than we ever have. We’re wiser, more mature, financially stable, and ready to take on life together.

I sometimes look back and I am amazed that, after all these years, we managed to find each other again. It was frightening when I first decided to go to Germany to visit her after three years of minimal contact aside from that during my deployment. I had a lot of doubts in that period, even after I finally bought the plane ticket. I think I was most afraid that I’d get there and she’d be a completely different person than the one I had known and loved. And she was. And I would’ve never imagined that a person, as great as she was then, could become as great as she is now.

-

Next year she will move here and we will start a life together and, for the second time, I will know what it’s like to be young and in love. I used to think that I’d never find someone like her again or - what was worse - that I’d never find her again. When I’d go to bed at night, if I was feeling uneasy or restless, I would close my eyes and remember that summer we shared together: the smell of Wisconsin grass, the blue sky, and her eyes, green-and-blue like something underwater. I thought I’d never have that again.

I’ve never been so happy to be so wrong.

-

Today we said good-bye to one another for what will hopefully be one of the last times. It was a good kind of good-bye, without sadness or doubt. It was the first good-bye that I’ve ever had with someone that I genuinely enjoyed, because it was the kind of thing that gave evidence to the certainty of our relationship. I am sad, sure, but my sadness is overwhelmed by my belief - and I’ve never been a romantic, even now, in spite of everything - that we will be together in the future.