Yesterday's Magazette

"Everyone Has A Yesterday"

I remembered her best in the cold winter nights. I leaned back against the recliner while a fire log snapped in the warm glow of the smoldering hearth beside me. On my lap I held a shoebox, its color faded with age. I gently lifted the top and the first envelope I saw bore her unmistakable handwriting. 

Twenty-five years had passed and I still felt a quiver in my chest whenever I held her letter. The scent of its lavender seal had dissipated over the years, yet the memories of it were as fresh as yesterday.

She was not the first woman I’d ever loved, but the first that stole my heart.

*****

“Hey dude, check this out!” I felt my ribs being poked. I opened my eyes and rubbed the drowsiness off my face. I must’ve fallen asleep on my Elementary Physics book of all things.

I squinted and tried to focus my eyes to see who or what Jay Banguero was smiling at. I stood and twisted my body in order to see around my floor hockey team’s well-rounded goalie. Jay was shameless as he drooled, with an ever-widening grin on his face, over the approaching young woman. I slapped him over the side of his head and was about to admonish my friend when our eyes met.

She was a head shorter than I, maybe more. Her dark shoulder-length hair seemed to flow with a flourish as she gently brushed a stray lock from her tanned, oval face. Her eyes glittered behind the sensuous shutter of her lashes. I couldn’t help but notice the rise and fall of her bosom when she suddenly stopped right in front of me.

 “Hi,” I said while I pushed down hard on Jay’s shoulder to keep our restless, stout stallion from bolting.

“Hey there,” she said. “I believe that you took my textbook by mistake.”

I had to blink several times before I realized what she just said.

“Really?”

She nodded towards the Elementary Physics tome that up until a few minutes ago had been a most uncomfortable pillow. Jay and I liked to take a nap in the school library each time we walked out of Professor Miller’s Grade 13 yawn of a Physics class.

I picked up the heavy text and shrugged. “You must’ve been mistaken.”

She reached out and turned the book around with its spine facing down. There, inscribed in black, permanent marker across the compressed edge of its pages was the name, “J. Harada.”

“Oh,” said I. But I held onto the book. I was savoring the soft warmth of her hands wrapped around my fingers and could not let go.

“Can I please have it back now?” She smiled.

“Have what back?”

I suddenly felt a sharp pain on the back of my head forcing me to open my hands.

_____________________________________________

My heart raced in anticipation as I saw her walk towards me.

_____________________________________________

“Her book, you idiot!” Our portly stallion had obviously been quicker to recover from her charms than I had.

I heard a soft laugh and when I turned around after subduing Jay on the table in a friendly headlock, she was gone.

Physics was the most boring class in my weekly agenda that fall, not on account of the subject matter itself, but rather its style of delivery. A bomb could explode in the middle of the class and Professor Miller would have continued his monologue on the basic principles of force and energy without missing a beat.

But on the following Monday after I accidentally lifted her book off the table next to me, I was the first one to arrive in class. With a quick mental calculation, I stepped seven paces back from the teacher’s desk and jumped over the seat to my left. After convincing myself of the accuracy of my geo-positioning calculation of the location of my seat from the last class, I waited for the rest of the stragglers to arrive.

Ten minutes later, I waved at her when I saw her coming in with two other girls. They looked at each other in surprise until I saw her whisper something which somehow made the other two giggle and move on to another part of the room.

My heart raced in anticipation as I saw her walk towards me. I lifted my gym bag from the seat to my right and stood up in order to greet her.

“Well, hello again!” She smiled. “Is that seat for me?”

“Maybe,” I said and extended my hand towards her. “As soon as you tell me your name. We’ve only had the same class for the past month and I’m bad at names.”

“Jeni Harada,” she said, shaking my hand.

“Richard.”

“I know.”    

“You do?”

“I’m good at names, especially those belonging to people who usually sleep at the back of the room,” Jeni said as she took the seat beside me.  

“Ouch! I think you just hurt his feelings, my dear young lady.” Jay Banguero could not have picked a worse time to join us.

“Three’s a crowd, Jay,” I snapped.

“Hey, don’t be like that! Besides, I’m dying to know how it turns out,” Jay winked at both of us. “I’m Jay, by the way.”

“Jeni.” She said and formally shook his hand in return. “What do you want to find out?”

“You do not know that he’s trying to make a pass at you?” Jay winked.

Jeni turned around to face me and asked, “Are you?”

Whenever she gave me that innocent look in the time that we’d known each other, I could never tell whether she was teasing me or not. All I knew at that moment was that my face felt very hot and my palms were suddenly wet and clammy.

Professor Miller chose that time to walk into the class, open his notes without looking at anyone and began another boring lecture of pecan “pi” to the power of forty-two.

***** 

I opened my eyes at the snap of the fire log beside me. I stood up and briefly shifted the partially consumed chunk of wood with the iron poker.

I picked up the letters once again from the shoebox and sat down on the recliner.

Jeni and I became the best of friends that year. I would like to think that there was something more between us.

Looking back after so many years, I had to wonder whether that “something” was merely a dream. For some reason, neither of us ever spoke about the subject of a possible “something” ever since my buddy, Jay, blurted out my intent back at Professor Miller’s class.

Jeni Harada graduated with high honors and left town to study at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. We promised each other to keep in touch and never lose that friendship.

I remembered during that first year we were apart, how I would often check the mailbox for the anticipated arrival of her correspondences.

I took a deep breath as I picked out a faded purple envelope from the stack. I tried to remember the sweet scent of its lavender seal the first time I opened it. I carefully lifted the fragile flap of the envelope and read the very last letter she sent for the thousandth time. For years I could not understand why she stopped writing to me.

Her last letter was filled with excitement over the various activities she’d yet to experience in Vancouver, and the new friends she had made. I was happy for her, happy to receive her letters and then . . . she was gone.

Three years later, Jay and I joined a group of former high school friends for our annual reunion in a restaurant. Jay Banguero had grown stockier since our hockey days and his usual caustic sense of humor had sobered over the years.

“Did you hear the news about our mutual friend?” he asked.

“News? What news? Which mutual friend are you referring to, Jay?”

“You know who I’m talking about, Rich. Her. Jeni.”

I suddenly felt a lump in my throat. I tried to wash it down with the bottle of beer in my hand.

“Go on.”

“Well, you didn’t hear this from me, but I heard from someone who used to be her close friend back in high school, that Jeni had apparently been going out with a successful businessman since she left UBC. It’s rumored that they both just rented a cottage for the weekend and that they’re even talking about marriage next spring. Can you believe that?”

No. I couldn’t believe it even if she broke the news herself.

Not my Jeni.

Not her.

She was pure at heart and all the goodness in that woman meant everything in the world to me.

But the truth always hurt the most, the truth of how she really felt about me.

*****

I folded the letter and placed it back into the shoebox. In spite of everything that Jay had told me and from others who later confirmed the marriage, deep in my heart, she was still the one.

*****

About nine years ago, I went to see an outstanding performance by the Toronto Dance Theatre at the Harbourfront Centre. It was about the dance of the Spirits of the Northern Sky. The petite,  principal lead dancer was apparently a seasoned performer of the company. She was at the center stage of the entire show.

I sat transfixed by the sensuous undulating of her hips. The tight linen wrap around her torso stirred a longing that I’d forgotten long ago. Though she was clearly much older, I could never forget that tanned, oval face even through all these intervening years.

Her dance was powerful, captivating and utterly beautiful.

Her name was Jeni Harada, and once upon a time, I was in love with her.