I hadn’t kissed a girl in twenty years old. I was forty now. Two decades of preoccupation with literature and video games and other guy things. It happens, you know. Life goes by so quickly that you forget the really important things.

   The great reminders come from children.  On April 4th, 2016.I was presented with my twenty year old son. I hadn’t known he’d existed until now. The girl I’d slept with never told me. And with good reason. I would have run screaming for the hills, made a complete mess of everything. She was smart enough to know this.

    So why now? I wondered. Why now? Did he need my bone marrow? Was he dying?

    “No,” he said at the Starbuck we’d decided to meet at. A lot, lot, lot more had happened before this. There was “The Call” and then “The Revelation” and then “DNA testing-Part Duh” until finally we found ourselves meeting for the first time.

    I was thrilled to realize he hadn’t taken after me. He was tall and gorgeous with his mother’s blond hair and gray-ish eyes. He was smart and well-mannered. Flawless personality.

   I felt more like shit than ever.

   “So what happened,” I explained to him, after taking a quick sip of my decaf Grande with Splenda. “Is that I was a fat fourteen year old who was really out at sea.”

   “Out at sea?” He asked. And naturally he would. Who says “out at sea” nowadays anyway? Except popular romance novelists and ne’er-do-well psychics?

   “I was confused,” I amend. “About a lot of things.”

   “You were just a kid,” he says.

   “Exactly!”  I said, appreciating this empathy. Or at least wanting to sense it.

   “We were all kids,” he said. He drinking a more complicated drink than I am. Something iced, with foamy specks of what looks like chocolate. He has a frothy moustache.

    “Gosh, I love you,” I blurt out.

    “I wish I could say the same thing.”

    I’m soaring and I feel the bottom drop out from under me. “I understand,” I force myself the thing to say. I cannot expect to be loved back, after what I’ve done or haven’t done for twenty years.

     “Maybe some day I will,” he says.

     And that feels better. Then comes the bombshell. Of course, why else would he want to see me?

     “It’s nothing bad,” he maintains. “It’s good, actually.”
     “Yeah?” I say, wanting to be hopeful. The whole event fell like a ballad, one of those top ten songs where someone is lamenting someting and–that’s all their doing. There is no solution. There might be an offer of one. But nothing that the singer attempts to accomplish.