I did a double take as I re-read the name of the sender. Vick, the love of my young 20's, that crazy, destructive, kind of love, that takes years to decompress from and a few trips to a therapist's couch, who disappeared off the face of the earth 17 years ago, had contacted me through Facebook.
"Well, hey, stranger! Hope you're well," sums up the message I found in my inbox.
"Wow, what a coincidence to hear from you," I respond. "I just wrote a blog post about the time the two of us got thrown into jail. Here's the link if you want to read it."
A few days later:
"I don't agree with everything you say in here. You make me out to be the bad guy."
You weren't a bad guy, I think to myself, but a bad-ass, yes. Duh, Vick! That's why I was so into you!
I go on a Vick reconnaissance mission, which is easy to do, now that I have some basic information from his Facebook profile. I never before thought to internet-stalk Vick, which is odd, given that's what everyone seems to do with their ex's these days. Vick disappeared during an era before our lives became readily available to each other through social media. As our collective privacy diminished, I moved farther and farther away from the eye of the Vick storm, until the day came that he was a memory from the past, that I was content to see stay there. But now that his thumbnail photo was staring at me, my curiosity piqued.
I found a profile of Vick on his company's website. There was a photo of the today Vick versus the Vick I knew long ago. Sometime between then and now, Vick became a middle aged guy. Not a bad looking middle-aged guy, but something seemed different about him. He has lost…his Vickness.
The Vick I knew was on a destructive path, playing a game that he was certain to lose. I was glad to see he was alive and safe. Yet, the perceived normalcy of his current existence, a steady job, a Saturday morning golf game, a retirement account, versus the Vick who lived on Marlboro Reds and grain alcohol, who had been the subject of several attempts of mine at bad poetry of adolescent fervor, was jarring. Vick's present reality is the one most of us strive for, yet it was a stark contrast compared to the legends that I had fabricated and accepted as truth over the years. He had settled on an exotic island in the South Pacific, a commune in Northern California, an Ashram in New Delhi. He was a Mormon with four wives, a survivalist living in the Ozarks, a televangelist who worked under an assumed name.
Vick and I had a brief round of messages, each giving the other selective details of our lives. He was in real estate, he married well, he had a son. We were polite. It's odd how time anesthetizes a situation like ours, where you go from being intimately and emotionally involved in every last detail of one's life, to the point where it turns your heart inside out, to being complete strangers, as if having small talk with the guy on the stool next to you at an airport bar.
I'm not sure what people set out to accomplish when contacting old loves on Facebook. Satisfy human curiosity? Entertain a "what if?" for a brief moment? See if you've aged well? Make amends? Some want to re-live their glory days, especially if life has not worked out according to plan. But those weren't Vick's glory days, and they certainly weren't mine.
If we are among the lucky ones, our glory days are now.
©2012 Ilene Evans
