Light My Fire
Now that you’re up to speed on what has transpired over the past 6 weeks and what happened at the beginning of last year, I’m going to fill in the blanks of what occurred between the two Florida Man volumes.
I ended things with Florida Man the first time in April of last year. As I told you in the previous story — the break up was so toxic that I spent 6 weeks in Missouri. What I didn’t tell you is that just days prior to us ending things, I received a blast from the past while I was in Mexico with Florida Man. He was asleep after we had another argument due to his emotional abuse of me while on the cruise when I decided to peruse Facebook using cellular-at-sea (Thanks, T-Mobile). I noticed I had a blast from the past in my friend requests, a high school classmate who I always thought was cute but too Blonde for me. I know, it’s a little hair colorist of me but I grew partial to guys with dark hair.
Anyways, when I saw his friend request I got a little excited. I was also hesitant to accept it while at sea with Florida Man because of how he interrogated me about pretty much anyone of the opposite sex on my follow list/friends list. I scoffed and said “Fuck it” when I thought about how he disrespected me the whole cruise texting his ex-wife the whole time and flirting with this Snooki clone at the bar our first night onboard, not to mention our whole relationship. I clicked “accept”.
Alexa, play “Light My Fire” by The Doors…
“The time to hesitate is through. No time to wallow in the mire. Try now, we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre. Come on baby, light my fire.”
We’ll call him Shaggy. My cousin brought it to my attention that he resembles Shaggy from Scooby-Doo and I can’t unsee it. Zoinks! He’s always been tall and slender. He was blindingly Blonde in high school but as he got older he let it get a little sandier; really leaning into the Shaggy look. He even grew some chin hair. I’m not mad at it.
Let’s rewind back to 2004. I had just transferred schools. My family had moved to La Mesa from Hell Cajon during my sophomore year of high school but I wasn’t allowed to transfer schools until the start of junior year. I was excited for a fresh start since I hated my old school and most of the people that went there. I was glad to leave it behind and make new friends, stop ditching school running from people who wanted to beat me up and maybe have a shot at having a date to senior prom. You know, things of that nature.
It kind of sucked because my best friend since seventh grade lived in the South Bay and went to a different school. I also started school weeks before she did. At least she was available for me to text her while I was on lunch or in between classes. I knew one person who was in my Spanish class because we got our hair done by the same family friend. I wound up meeting someone who would become a friend and little did I know my prom date as well in the same class. But back to Shaggy…
The first time I noticed him had to be in our Advisory class. I noticed his tall slender frame, pooka shell necklace and Super Saiyan Blonde locks. You will only get that reference if you watched Dragon Ball-Z. I didn’t but my cousins watched enough Toonami for me to know what it is. I thought he was cute. I didn’t know his name and I wasn’t just going to be like “Hey, I’m new here”. I didn’t know his name until third period. We had another class together and he sat in back of the guy who would become my crush junior year because of his dark hair, olive skin and green eyes. He also made the mistake of being nice to me. That’s another story for another time.
Anyways, Shaggy and I never really had a conversation in high school that I can remember. There may have been awkward, shy glances from time to time. We had different prom dates. He dated an upper classman our junior year. We knew some of the same people, had two classes together and saw each other in the hallway from time to time. I think that’s about it. There’s also a picture where we are next to each other standing on a hillside in a group during a senior carnival before graduation. We both attended the same college but never ran into each other.
Fast forward 17 years…
Our Facebook friendship started off with him liking the photos I posted from Mexico with Florida Man and his two adorable daughters. Then, there was some witty banter about not liking Los Angeles after I posted something laughing at the Dodgers. The SD in us just won’t allow us to like LA; he’s a 4th-generation San Diegan (I believe) and I’m a 2nd-generation San Diegan. You can see my disdain for the shallowness of LA in Why You’d Want to Live Here.
We then went without really talking. I guess he was sitting back and observing? Maybe waiting to find an “in”. While I was in St. Louis healing from my break up with Florida Man, I was sitting up one night about midnight which would be 10 pm on the West Coast when I got a message from Shaggy. He saw my picture at Busch Stadium with my family and me rocking a Padres jersey because again, hometown pride. He took that as an opportunity to talk to me and then asked if I wanted to go see some standup comedy when I got back to San Diego. I told him I didn’t know when I was coming back because truthfully I didn’t. I booked a one-way ticket because I wasn’t sure how long I would need to be away. I flew back in July but by then he was in Alaska working as a chef and kayaking through ice caves in Valdez, “pronounced Val-deez as in DEEZ nuts” (his words, not mine).
Shaggy sent me some wonderful photos of Alaska and when he got back to San Diego, we made plans to go on our first date to see Natalie Friedman. I got out of my Lyft and we hugged hello. It felt warm and kind like “Nice to see you after almost two decades”. It was a little awkward at first. I shared with him that my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer days prior and he shared with me his mother’s battle with cancer. His mother had passed. We then decided we would just try to focus on having a good night and taking our minds off of those things. As the night went on, we talked and laughed. We apparently were having too much fun because Natalie Friedman called us out for being too giggly and into our conversation with each other. Sorry, Nat. There was a Q&A portion of her routine and Shaggy asked her if she had a time machine to go back to any period what period would she go back to. Her response? “You must’ve taken some shrooms before you came in here”. He is a bit of a hippie, which again I’m not mad at. He asked me the same question and I told him the 60s so we could go to Woodstock, see The Doors and maybe Jimi Hendrix if we were lucky. He said he’d get right on it. I’m still waiting.
After the show, he offered to take me home since I was on his way back up to the mountains. It felt nice to know he drove from the mountains to the Gaslamp Quarter for a date with me. But as I found out, he loves to drive and “Everything is on the way”. As we walked to his car, he held my hand and I felt the warmth. There was something between us. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew once my hand was in his that I wanted to find out. We had pleasant conversation while on the highway to the East County acting like giggly nervous 16 year-olds. I asked him coyly calling him by his full family name : “Can I…touch your hair? I’ve always wanted to”. He smiled and said “Of course. I would love that”. As I ran my fingers through his hair, I felt as he would put it “electricity” between us. And when we pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex, we made out like teenagers. Neither one of us wanted to say goodnight but it was too soon for sex.
“You know that it would be untrue. You know that I would be a liar, if I were to say to you, girl we couldn’t get much higher. Come on baby, light my fire.”
That weekend, he was off to Chicago to visit a friend. I wasn’t far from his mind. Maybe being at the Bears and Broncos game had something to do with it. We texted pretty much the whole game including sharing the same reaction when the Bears refused to kick a chip-shot field goal allowing the Broncos to get their first win of the season when both teams were winless heading into it. Someone I can talk sports with? Check. He’s a Chiefs fan/disgruntled ex-Chargers fan. I guess love makes room for faults. We talked his whole flight home. And he forgot that he had to abruptly leave for Arizona just after returning home from Chicago for a Adult World Series baseball game. I forgot to mention he also coaches baseball at our alma mater. Shaggy told me there was no way he was waiting a full week to see me again. I took that Tuesday off to spend the day with him at Black’s Beach (the not nude part).
How was it? In the words of Sandra Dee as Gidget: “It was creamy”. October in San Diego is fire season. So it’s still somewhere close to 90 degrees. It’s our local summer after the tourists leave and stop torturing the seals at the Children’s Pool. Anyways, it was a beautiful day. It felt good to be with someone who was nice to me. He made me feel secure where as Florida Man didn’t. When he pulled me close, I felt warmth and not anxiety. We shared sweet kisses while looking into each other’s eyes on the tarp he brought out and even as lifeguards drove by and paragliders flew overhead, it felt like we were the only two people in the world. After watching the sunset, we decided to go for sushi. But not before getting distracted kissing while walking the trail from the beach back to his car. As he said, there’s a “soreness when your lips part from mine”. Shaggy was very poetic and had an extensive vocabulary. I nicknamed him my little “word-a-day calendar”. I was completely enamored with him. I felt even more safe to be myself when I started singing “Ventura Highway” by America in the middle of dinner while he smiled and placed his hand on mine impressed by my ear. Spinning me around and kissing me while walking to his car wasn’t a bad thing either.
We drove around the backroads through Mt. Helix after he spoke to his pitcher friend he was picking up ithe next morning on his way to Arizona. His friend was surprised to know it was 9 pm and he was still with me considering he picked me up at three in the afternoon. His friend told him that he was happy for him since he knew how long it had been since he really liked someone. For me, my ex had broken my spirit so much that for the first time in six months I was genuinely smiling. I was happy to see Shaggy’s name pop up on my phone. I felt less alone and ready to open my heart amongst other things for the first time. As Ariana Grande said in her song Supernatural: “I need your hands all over my body like the moon needs the stars”. With every touch and every kiss, I wanted more of him. It sounds crazy. I know.
After this, he went to Arizona to play his baseball world series and we kept in contact counting down the moments until we could see each other again. I supported him as his cheerleader from afar and he won an award while playing. Once he made it back to SD, we went to one of my most sacred places Lake Murray. It’s a popular recreational spot but it became my sanctuary when I started running. You’ll see why this matters later. Walking around the lake holding hands with him made it more special to me. The fact that he had to see me immediately when he got back from Arizona meant the world to me in that moment. We found a spot near a tributary and shared tender kisses until the sun went down. The teasing. The tracing of my face, running his fingers through my hair and tracing the waistband of my shorts…it drove me wild.
Our next outing would be watching the Chiefs and Broncos game at my cousin’s house. Little did I know my cousin’s son would take a liking to him and view Shaggy as his playmate instead of my date. He spent the whole night grabbing Shaggy and telling him to come play. He also yelled at us to “Stop kissing!” if we tried to sneak them. My mother is hard to impress and he met her that night. Ok, sure he had on an oversized Jimi Hendrix t-shirt and probably some jeans from when he had gained weight before he stopped drinking and started hiking but come on mom…be reasonable! My mother’s opinion: “He looks like a dirty hippie…and yes, he has a lot of hair”. Anyways, after we left my cousin’s house we dropped my mom off and headed up to the mountains to spend some alone time. We made love until we passed out. We woke up and did it again until we went hiking in the Laguna Mountains, his sanctuary.
We watched as hawks circled their prey in the canyon. I cut my leg on a branch because I wore shorts like an idiot. After hiking, he made dinner and we watched Forrest Gump. He learned how to play my favorite Beatles song “Blackbird” on his guitar and played it as I got out of the shower. The next day, we went out walking a trail nearby his house, got pizza and ate fudge in the Julian Pioneer Cemetery like a couple of weirdos. Honestly, sitting on his lap in that cemetery was the first time I’d ever felt not creeped out in a cemetery. I was just happy to be with him. But that Sunday, I could feel that something was changing. I didn’t know that by that Wednesday, he would completely pull away from me. And by that Friday, he ended things by the runner’s entrance at Lake Murray. My sanctuary. He took away my sanctuary. I didn’t have to agree to meet there, mind you. Stupidly, I did. He told me he cared about me and he doesn’t sleep with people he doesn’t like or have feelings for. Maybe that’s true. But in that moment, all I felt was used because I dared to give myself to someone for the first time in 6 months after being emotionally abused and verbally abused by my ex. I dared to let myself feel again. So, having someone go back on what they said was like a kick in the gut. He claimed he wanted to remain friends and be there for me while my mom was still battling cancer. He disappeared. I disabled my Facebook account for a while and then reappeared.
I posted about my tumultuous year including him but not by name as I do with these stories and he texted me out of the blue. I guess I struck a nerve. He told me the car we spent nights making out and listening to music in had been totaled and he had a near death experience. Of course, I felt bad hearing that. I wouldn’t wish that on him or anyone for that matter…not even Florida Man. I told him that I was sorry about his car but glad that he was alive. But I also told him that if this was a month prior I might have more to say because I still feel lied to and used. That’s when he blocked me as if I had done something wrong by telling him how he made me feel.
Honestly, the ending is very love in the digital age. Love megabytes.