Deja Vu

My first kiss was on a roller-coaster. Her name was Sandra, she had blue eyes, brown hair and a single freckle on her nose that was the only embellishment on a perfectly clear, pale face. 

 We had been dating for three weeks. After three months of clumsy flirting between classes, it was only after I was already madly in love with her that I asked her out. Not that she ever knew that.

 We held hands on all the drops, and when we were suspended upside down on the largest loop, two thirds of the way through, she leaned over and planted a kiss directly on my lips. 

"Don't be scared," She mouthed over the rush of wind and the delighted screams of the other riders.

  "I'm not." I mouthed back, grabbing her hand a little tighter, feeling the delicate bones  wrap around mine, a lock clicking into place. 

  We stepped off the ride still holding hands, and on the drive home she fell asleep in the back of my mom's white minivan, our hands clasped still. I watched her sleep all the way home.

  "Don't you have your own life? Your own dreams?" She said one morning, eating her cereal on the other side of the table from me. She tapped her spoon against the side of the bowl as she ate, tap tap tap. 

  "Of course I do," I said slowly, not knowing if this was going to be a fight or a conversation. 

  She blinked and looked up at me, her eyes blank, "Then what are you doing?"

 We had this conversation before, and I hadn't had an answer then. Now was no different.

"I'm going to work." Is all I managed to say before I bolted out the front door to my car.

 Her name was Susan and we met at work. 

She had blonde hair and brown eyes, with a splattering of freckles across her cheeks. I walked by her desk exactly once a week, to get supplies from the supply room for the rest of my department.

   The first week she smiled at me, the second week she told me her name, and for every week after that I learned something new about her. She liked cats, and water-slides.  She hated roller-coasters.

  We had our first kiss in the supply room. 

"Don't be scared," she whispered in the dark, her breath hot against my lips. 

"I'm not," I replied, reaching to hold her hand in mine.

  "When are you going to demand that raise?" Susan said, sitting across the dinner table from me, picking at her plain spinach salad with her fingers. 

  "I don't know, once I'm settled. The money doesn't really matter to me."

  "Don't you want things? Don't you have dreams? I want to live in a house someday you know."

  "Of course, I know." I replied, stepping toward the door as I spoke. 

Her name was Sara and I met her at church. 

She had black hair and olive skin, her nose had a bend in it from when she broke it falling out of a tree years before. I only ever saw her smile when she was looking at me. 

  "I had a dream that I lived in a tent on the beach in Norway," She said one day, as I walked her to her car like I had been doing for the past three months. 

  "Oh yeah?" I replied, laughing. 

  "I think I'm going to do it."

  "Do what?" I opened the car door for her as she climbed in.

  "I just told you, go live on the beach in Norway."

  "But...why?" I was sure she was joking.

 She sighed, "Well, what do you dream about?"

  Our eyes met and I felt my heart stutter.

"Mostly you," I replied impulsively, leaning in to kiss her on her pale pink lips. She frowned, pulling away.

  "Nothing else?" 

I looked her in the eyes and saw Susan and Sandra layered over her face, although they looked nothing alike. 

I couldn't think of anything to say as she drove away.

  I kissed Sheila at the bar the night I met her. I was halfway between a sentence when she drunkenly stumbled into my arms for a kiss. I felt uneasy, and maybe she could tell because she told me not to be scared as she pulled me by the hand out of the bar into the taxi.

  I told her I wasn't.

We clasped hands in the bed, and when I cried out I said Sandra's name.

"Who's Sandra?" She said, not sounding mad, but pulling away from my touch.

 "Just a dream," I slurred, leaning in to kiss her again, "Nobody who matters."

  She gave me a look, "Maybe you should find a new dream."

  "I have dreams!" I said defensively, for the first time realizing it was a lie. For the first time I realized every girl was Sandra and every roller-coaster ends after the biggest loop.

  I spent that night looking at old pictures, drinking a handle of rum to myself. I had more pictures of me and Sandra than anyone else, because we went so many places. 

  She had given me an empty scrapbook for our one year anniversary and I had kept adding pictures of us throughout our relationship. 

  The last picture in the book was only halfway through the pages. It was Sandra and I at the beach, our hands barely touching. I pulled it out of its sleeve to look at it and glimpsed some writing on the back I had never seen before.

  "The worst lies are the ones you tell yourself. -S"

And I realized for the first time I had never really had any other dreams.