Day 10

Those letters were still visible on the tree, even after 40 years they were still there. It felt like just yesterday that we carved this. Seventeen years old, young and free, we couldn’t wait to graduate.
We spent our first summer out of high school here, with and without friends. We pitched a tent and slept under the stars nearly every night planning our future together. He vowed we would be together forever.

After school we attended the same college he studied art while I studied journalism. He wanted to be a famous artist, opening large galleries and selling paintings for hundreds of dollars. We both wanted to travel which fitted in with me always wanting to be a journalist.

As the years of college went on our relationship developed, it matured as we did, growing stronger each day.

We visited art galleries, made fun of the rich people buying paintings; we’d also make fun of the journalists on TV.

Go out partying all night with our friends, have late night barbeques down by the lake, play beer pong and any other drunken game we could think of to entertain ourselves.

There were times we’d go sit in the twenty four hour diners just simply hanging out, go to the bar down the road from our home to play pool all day.

They were some of the best days of my life.

The best day of my life was the day I met him, the day I met my Chase.

Junior year, he’d just transferred from some school in Georgia. His parents had needed to move with him being kicked out of every school in Atlanta. It was the first day back after high school, I was catching up with my friends in the corridor by our lockers when he passed by us. He looked amazing; I remember feeling butterflies in my stomach when he walked by me, his eyes never leaving me.

At least that’s what I thought, that weekend then the jock threw a party they invited Chase; he ended up making out with my best friend Stacy. Stupid really but we fell out over that, Stacy wouldn’t speak to me after I confronted her about him; she acted better than me for having gotten the new guy.

Our friends abandoned me to, they stuck with Stacy and Chase as he was still the new guy and somehow he ended up more popular than the hottest jock dating the cheerleader captain. Thanks to Stacy and Chase hooking up my ex friends became popular because they associated with her.

There was some girl in my English class who I was paired with for a creative writing assignment. Together we had to write a story about the theme our teacher assigned to us. I know ours was along the lines of to love and lost. Over the course of the year we had to write this Shelia and I started to become friends, she wasn’t like anyone else I’d known. She was the opposite of Stacy.

She had dark hair combined with dark makeup and cloths; she liked heavier music that took me a while to get used to. We spent all summer hanging out, travelling around the state for concerts of the bands she liked that I had started to like.

Things changed when we went back for senior year, Stacy and Chase had split up during the summer, she came crawling back to me, apologising for how she’d acted, how she had treated me when her and Chase first became a thing. I ignored her obviously; I was still hurt that she would do that, I continued to hang around with Shelia making sure we avoided Stacy and her friends.

We had a new addition to our Geography class that year, that new addition was Chase. Not only was he in that class he was also assigned to the empty seat beside me, it was then when I questioned what I had done to piss fate off.

He tried talking to be a lot at the start, I kept telling him I wasn’t interested. I knew that was a lie, but after months I gave in and started talking to him. He started to hang around with Shelia and I, even introduced Shelia to her future husband. He asked me to prom when graduation was upon us, it was that night he asked me out.

We were together for years, all the way through college and even after college for a few years. We fought during college a few times usually after a party, after college was when our relationship became strained. The fights got worse, they became more frequent.

We broke a lot of our furniture when fighting back then. The worst it ever got I left for a few days, stayed with Shelia and her husband Andrew. She convinced me to go back, because Chase was the one for me, I couldn’t give up on that.

I still can’t make my mind up if going back was the best thing I could have done. It lasted for a month before he got up and left after our last fight. But only this time he never came back. Andrew helped me clear out his things; even he didn’t know where Chase had gone. A few months later I couldn’t stand it anymore; I packed my stuff up and moved back in with my mother.

A few years later I secured a job as a journalist at the local newspaper where I slowly got the experience to move to other companies. Years later I moved to another company where I got to report live and travel. That’s when I met Sebastian. He was a journalist from England, he wanted to travel mostly, and journalism appeared to be the best course of action for that.

I married him two years later, and the next year we had our first baby, a little girl called Dakota. We both still work in journalism, Dakota’s around seven now, she’s home schooled with all the travelling we do.

Tonight we were attending the debut opening of the newest art gallery in LA. I was a little nervous; I haven’t been to an art gallery since Chase.

A few hours into the night the owner of the gallery went to announce their star artist. I was frozen still when I saw the man appear in front of the curtain that was likely hiding a masterpiece.
Standing there was Chase, still looking as good as ever. His eyes immediately found mine, his lips tugging up into a smile.