"I was listening for your feet
With my ear, pressed hard upon the ground.
I was waiting for your thunder and quake
And love you finally came.
Alleluia."
I Was Listening, I Was Waiting ~ Songs To Sail By ~ M. Coffee & C. Quinn
***********
I really left on quite a cliffhanger, didn't I?
It wasn't my intention to do so.
Yes it was -- it totally was.
What I meant to say was that I didn't mean to make it sound so dramatic because, now that I think about it, the circumstances that brought Zack and I back together weren't that bizarre or disturbing. Well, hang on. They were bizarre and disturbing to me. And to Zack. And to the rest of my friends and family. But in the grand scheme of oh -- life -- perhaps not so much.
I was at my Father's house one very very average day around the end of April 2007. He and my step-mom, Carey Lynn, lived about a mile and half away from my place and I would drop by quite a lot to see them.
I think I was sitting at the kitchen table when my phone rang. I remember that it was Carey Lynn who, in mid-sentence, looked down at my phone there on the table, picked it up, looked at the caller ID and said,
"It's Zack." Then again kind of yelling it this time, "It's ZACK!"
"Zack?"
The hairs on the back of my neck all decided to stand up at once. And then they all stretched.
Carey Lynn sort of threw the phone in my direction and I sort of caught it and there was this crazy sort of hot potato game moment where I couldntquitegetmyhandsonthephoneohmigoshohmigoshohmigosh...
"Hello?" I attempted to sound as demure and collected and nonchalant as possible.
"Hey. Where are you?" Zack's voice jumped through the phone, ran around to the back of my neck and woke up all the hairs again.
I was so stupid over the fact that I was on the phone with him that it took me a second to realize that he had asked me a question.
"Huh? Oh. I'm at my dad's house, why?"
"I'll be there in five minutes and tell you all about it."
"Well, okay then! See you in five!"
I hung up the phone with Carey Lynn looking at me expectantly,
"He's gonna be here in five minutes! I look like HELL. Carey Lynn I need to borrow some make-up or something!"
"Yes, of course, use whatever you need!" She gestured towards the bathroom and I ran in there and went from death warmed over to not going to scare anyone just in time to walk out onto my parent's back porch and see Zack walking up the driveway.
What is it that causes that glowing feeling when one sees the person one loves? I'm trying to pinpoint where it starts exactly. For me it feels like it's in my chest -- my sternum -- and, at the risk of sounding completely cheesy and corny -- without sounding completely nachos -- it's like a supernova* of LOVE.
When I saw Zack Arias I was so happy to see him I about fell over. Which isn't hard for me in the first place much less when my sternum, nay, my very HEART, is love supernova-ing and stuff.
He was carrying a stack of paper about an inch thick that he set down on the bench there on the deck.
"Last night I came back to the house and noticed that G______ was acting a bit squirrelly; a bit strange. Something was off. So, this morning, after she left for school, I started looking through some of her things and I found this in one of her backpacks," and he indicated towards the paper. "When I saw what they were I knew that I needed to tell you."
(Zack was still living in "the house" as he called it. He didn't even call it "home" just "the house". To give you an idea of the kind of man he is, he agreed to stay in the house until G______ finished a certification training she had started. He didn't have to, he didn't want to but, as he saw it, it was what he felt he should do to help the mother of his children.)
I picked up the papers and started to flip through them.
Then I realized what they were.
They were print outs of emails and messages from Myspace. (remember Myspace?)
She had broken into my personal email accounts and my Myspace account and had been reading them and printing them out.
I was flabbergasted. They ranged in date from December of the year before to just a couple of days prior. At first I thought that perhaps she was trying to get some dirt on Zack and me, that maybe she had been looking for evidence of us still seeing each other but, no. There were very personal emails in there, ones where I shared with good friends how life was going, song lyrics that I had emailed to myself to remember them, etc.
"How in the world did she get into my email?"
"She must've been snooping through my computer and found old saved iChats between you and I and found where you shared your iTunes password with me and started plugging that password into anything she could think of."
Whoa.
He went on, "I thought you should know because this is a criminal offense, no different than opening someone's mail with wrongful intent."
"This is very wrongful. This is weird. You know she told me how she had been spying on me in my house, right?"
I was shaking. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up again but this time not with excitement but in anger and this time they were joined with goosebumps. I could hear them all muttering and tut tutting and cracking their knuckles.
(Geez. No they weren't. Neck hairs and goosebumps don't have knuckles!)
Zack was giving me a knowing look.
"Well, Meg, you were in my front yard when she told you, remember? In the middle of the night?"
Ah she had told him about that then. Of course. Shit.
I bit my lip, "Yeah, well...I wasn't looking in the freakin' windows!"
He smiled at me and shook his head,
"You need to decide what you're going to do. You could press charges. I'm going to tell her I found this stuff and that you have it now and that you know about it. Immediately change your passwords to everything. I'm sorry that this happened."
We hugged each other then and then sat there for a little bit just enjoying the presence of the other. His hand was resting on his lap and I can remember the sight of his fingers slightly splayed across his leg.
Funny the things one remembers, hmmm?
*********
Zack and I sort of never stopped seeing each other after that day. We eased into it slowly, and by the time he had finally moved out of "the house" and into his own little place in July of 2007 I had actually furnished his entire house, at his request, while he was traveling. He threw a Fourth of July BBQ Party in his front yard, invited his entire family and introduced me as, "his friend, Meghan." Which I was, and, in case you were wondering, I still am.
In September, for my 29th birthday, he threw me the most amazing birthday party I have ever had. It was so lovely it's worth its own telling, but not now. It's incredible to me to think back on that time. To think about how, just the year before, I had been singing my heart out to Zack on the Eddie's Attic stage not knowing he could hear me in the parking lot, and then to have him so fully present in my life.
It was the beginning of October, shortly after his divorce was final, that he asked me out on a date. An honest to goodness real date. He found a lovely wine bar in Oakhurst called Palate and we sat outside on the patio, under a gorgeous old tree hung with candle lanterns. We couldn't deny anymore that we loved each other. We didn't have to deny anymore that we loved each other.
Zack picked up his wine glass, raised it a bit and said,
"Begin Transmission."
{to be continued...}
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*A supernova (plural supernovae) is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months. During this short interval a supernova can radiate as much energy as the Sun is expected to emit over its entire life span.[1] The explosion expels much or all of a star's material[2] at a velocity of up to 30,000 km/s (10% of the speed of light), driving a shock wave[3] into the surrounding interstellar medium. This shock wave sweeps up an expanding shell of gas and dust called a supernova remnant. ~Wikipedia