Wind of Possibility, Wind of Change

This morning, as I stood outside on the deck to feed the dogs, I noticed the wind blowing through the yard and thought there was something familiar about it. As I loaded my toddler up in the car to leave for work, I realized what it was, remembered where I knew that wind from.
It was the same wind that blew the night of a Halloween party I hosted when I was seventeen. I was out in my yard with Kevin. There were some other folks from the party outside, but that moment will always remind me exclusively of Kevin.
As the wind blew across my face, I remembered moments, like snapshots in time.
Junior high. Kevin had been my boyfriend, and one day while we were having lunch with his friends in the cafeteria, he had slipped his hand under my skirt and rested it on my bare inner thigh. It freaked me out, and I told my friend Chris about it, after which he dubbed him "Mr Scary". I had wanted to break up with Kevin because of Chris. There was always Chris during those years, my sometimes boyfriend and best friend. One day I decided there was enough reason, and when I told Chris, he offered to go tell him. There was a bit of drama, because instead of telling Kevin, he told a female friend of Kevin's, who kept saying "Kevin doesn't accept this breakup", which eventually erupted into a screaming match between Chris and her.
Day after eighth grade graduation. Kevin and his best buddy Stephen had invited me to go swimming at their neighborhood pool. While we were swimming, Kevin was being a little handsy and I kept rebuffing his advances, because I had yet another boyfriend. Later, Kevin and I were drying off on the stairs of the clubhouse. He was still flirting and I was still rejecting him, and as we played around, a friend of my boyfriend's walked up and acted like he had busted me.
Later that afternoon, I went over to Kevin's house with him and Stephen because he wanted to show me something on his computer. It booted up, then as the programs opened, an audio clip played, saying "Kiss me Keely". He looked over to gage my reaction and I just looked at him, "stop it already!"
Later that night, I got a call from my boyfriend's friends, telling me he wanted to break up with me because "he knew I had been cheating on him". I kept telling them to put him on the phone, "let me explain," but they wouldn't. I am pretty sure it was the same guy that had seen me earlier in the day and took the whole thing out of context.
It was okay, because there was always Chris, Chris whose picture I slept with underneath my pillow every night. I would take it out and kiss it before I went to sleep, then put it back under my pillow to give me sweet dreams. My mother found it when she was changing my sheets one day and she asked me, "does this boy know you sleep with his picture under your pillow?" My answer was along the lines of "I'm sure he wouldn't be surprised." Chris and I had gone out, and he knew I wanted to get back together, but my reputation as a heartbreaker prevented it. The halls of my junior high were littered with my discarded boyfriends, and he said he didn't want to be the flavor of the week again, that he wanted me to prove to him I could stay in a relationship that lasts.
So I spent the dreary summer dating the boy next door. Three months into it, and we had gone a month without seeing each other. I had been gone for two weeks, and when I got back, he was at a friend's house for two weeks. Apparently when I was gone, he had seen a letter I sent to my best friend, and he called me one night with one question, "Who's Chris?" My response was only "I think we should break up."
After that, it was high school, and football season, and Chris and I in love. His kisses were hungry and always had the threat of sex on them. We talked about it as a possibility down the road, but we both knew we weren't ready. Our relationship was one of hot heat, of fire, a passion for each other that sometimes erupted into fierce fights, arguments over the phone, in the hallways. Months later, I was sick of fighting with him and broke it off. A month later, I met Billy and all bets were off.
Next year, football season again. Billy and I had a traumatic breakup and I had been through changes in my soul. Chris and I spent every day on the phone. One day when I came in from a run during which I had been thinking of him, the phone rang. He was on the other line and suggested that we break off our seperate dates for the night and go out together. While I was talking to him, there was a knock on my door and that night's date was there. He came in and was giving me some apologetic story for why he couldn't go out. "It's okay, " I told him, pushing him out the door so I could get back on the phone with Chris, and that night we went to dinner, went to a party that I don't even remember, because we spent our time pressed up against my car, making out, with those hungry kisses and the possibility of sex, or getting back together.
We didn't, because the next night the girl he was supposed to take out showed up at my door and wanted to talk, and it caused a big fight between Chris and I that we never really got over, though the possibility was always there.
Halloween night, my junior year. I was seventeen. I was hosting this party and had brought my latest boyfriend over to the house for my mother to meet. He was fifteen and innocent, and initially I had thought I was going to take that innocence from him, the way Billy did with me when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. I saw the situation in reverse. When I picked him up for our first date, his mom had hugged him close when he was leaving, kissed him on the top of the head, told him she loved him, told me to be careful with her baby. He was still a kid, still mommy's baby, and I saw that as part of his appeal. I didn't want to take that from him. We had gone to see the laser light show downtown, and during it, he had taken my hand and we held hands all night. After the show, we parked at the neighborhood park and sat in the car in silence, holding hands and looking at the stars. That is the closest we ever got in the three months we dated. Our relationship was like a cloud, soft and pretty but nothing you could touch. If you got too close, it would evaporate.
On this night, he was inside toasting pumpkin seeds with my mother, and a group of us had gone outside. Kevin and I were running in the yard in the wind, and suddenly he tackled me, hiking his knee up inside my skirt. I felt it then, the possibility of desire running hot in my veins. "Do it again!" I laughed, and ran through the yard, him chasing me, then tackling me again, his weight across my chest, his leg hard between my thighs. I realized then I felt an attraction for Kevin, but he had recently acquired a girlfriend, Christy. "Crusty", I dubbed her, out of a sudden jealousy, and vowed to hate her, but I met her eventually and she was pretty cool.
There was always the possibility, though, that they might break up. I held on to that night in my yard with the wind, the possibility that time was still long, that anything could happen, that someday I might actually kiss Kevin and know what that felt like, that someday Chris and I could forget our differences and work things out.
When you are young, you have this feeling that there is always time, that someday those things might really happen. The future is unknown, and in it lay a thousand possibilities. I wondered in that yard that night what might happen in my life, who I might end up with, and there were so many options, opportunities, and one day those are just gone, the future is past, you are locked in to a present that may or may not offer those golden chances.
At my high school reunion, I looked for Chris, and I looked for Kevin. Kevin was in Dallas making audio clips for video games, and Stephen was there, showing me pictures of Kevin's wedding in Scotland. Chris was nowhere to be found. I have heard he is living in my hometown again, somewhere probably within miles of my house, but I will probably never run into him. I always think about him, and the chance we had that we didn't take, and sometimes I long to talk to him and tell him about how I married "him", a man that was so much like him in so many ways.
For now, though, I have the wind that sometimes blows in and brings these memories, the memory of "what was" and "what could have been", and the winds of change that brought my husband to me and my two children and my life now.