Her Majesty

It is Tuesday and Abbey Road is the only thing keeping me from a total melt down at work. Why can’t I be happy having a mundane and unfulfilling job if it keeps me housed and fed. Everyone else seems to be. No, that is not what I want. So I let myself feel the angst of a corporate day job while one the greatest albums of all time reminded me that the world is indeed a beautiful place, but I was not ready for the last song on the album, Her Majesty.

Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she doesn’t have much to say,
Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she changes from day to day,
I want to tell her that I love her a lot but I’ve got to get a belly full of wine,
Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
Someday I’m gonna make her mine,
Someday I’m gonna make her mine…….
Benjamin sent me those lyrics in an email when I was eighteen. It was pretty fitting. At the time I didn’t have much to say and I didn’t say what I did have to say. He wanted to make me his, but I wasn’t his to be had. I had too much exploring I needed to do on my own. It ended badly and he got really into drugs and dropped out of college. He stuck around our college town though. Sometimes I would go see his band play or ask people who knew him how he was. I was a psycho stalker even back then. When I was 22 I ran into a guy that had lived in the room next to his freshman year and ended up managing his band. He told me that Benjamin had recently mysteriously disappeared and no one knew where he went. I graduated and moved out of our college town and got on with my life, but I always wondered what happened to him. I imagined that he might have died. Maybe he commited suicide or overdosed. Back in college I had heard rumors that he had gotten married, but I didn’t believe them. For years I found myself googling his name, but he has a common last name and it was useless. I never found anything until last year, ten years after our relationship had begun and ended. I found his blog and then I started reading it everyday. It did not have a lot of information about his personal life, but I was able to conclude that he had gotten married, and he did get married when he was only 20. His blog was pretty much his commentary on politics and pop culture.  His pop culture commentary often revolved around the same geek boy things he was into in college – Bat Man, Star Trek. (Even hard drug using rocker guys can never escape their inner geek.) He appears to be happily married and still living in Central Illinois.

He was the man that made me break on through to the other side, so to speak, in so many ways. From reading his blog it seemed liked I ended up going even further than he did. I left the town, and then the state. I’ve had many relationships since him and he married his second girlfriend. What does that say about either of us? I really don’t know. When I first found the blog I was sad because a part of me will always love him and I couldn’t help but think that if we met now it would work out great. As much as I do not believe in souls mates, I always thought of him as my soul mate because he was my first love. A substantial amount of people end up with their first love, never exploring the possibility that there could be others. Never exploring the possibility that being alone is healthy and normal. We loved in a fierce, needy, desperate, and generally fucked up way, but as much as I denied it then, I now acknowledge that needy, desperate, fucked up love is still love, even if it is not the kind of love I seek. That is why I broke up with him eleven years ago and that is why I am single now.

He really did regard me as being his majesty though, and I’d like to think that I’m still a pretty nice girl despite all the additional layers of personality I’ve acquired.