I would have to say a lot of life was lived after losing touch with David in 1983, for both of us. Yeah...a lot of life. It would be 27 years before we would hear each others voice again and just three short months after that when we would be standing in an airport arms wrapped around each other crying, laughing and thanking God we had found each other again. But I digress...
I know for David... still reeling from our break up, he went and immediately got a tattoo on the front side of his right hip, it was a broken heart about the size of a silver dollar, and for him it was a symbol of his true love lost. He then packed up his belongings and set out for California to live with a friend. I can only imagine what that adventure was like...the sea, the sun and the girls...every young boys dream life I would say. However, I do know that 2 years of that was all it took before he felt compelled to return to the coast he calls home...the East Coast...Rhode Island to be exact. You see David was not really the adventurous man about town type...he was simple and innocent and searching...searching for a family, a life, a unit of his own where he could feel safe to be himself...he was searching for that soft place to fall, always searching for that soft place to fall.
After returning 'home' he met and married a girl, in 1989, who would become the mother of his two beautiful children, they would be married for 17 long years before divorcing in 2006. Now get this...just one year later, in 2007 while living in Arkansas, I come home to find a mysterious message on my answering machine that says...'Is this my old friend who lived at 267 Chestnut Street?'...that was it! No name, no number, nothing...and I did not recognize the voice. Obviously, like any curious mind, I jumped on the internet and looked up the number that had appeared on my caller ID and lo and behold it was the name David J. Machado that I was looking at. My heart was flipping and flopping in my chest, I absolutely couldn't believe my eyes. How had he found me? How had he remembered me? What did he want? Clearly he didn't think I was going to call him back, I mean come on, it had been 24 years since seeing or talking to him. I had been 16 and he 18 when we parted ways...I was SOOO not calling him back! Jeesh, really!!! For the next 3 days I thought of nothing but the phone call and the dear sweet 18 year old boy who had taken the time to reach out and make contact with me again, and I called. Yup, I did it, I picked up that phone and dialed that number and then stopped breathing while counting the rings of the phone...and then that voice... the one I didn't recognize, it was now informing me...the caller...that he was not home and to please leave a message. HA, so I did what any 16 year old girl would do...I hung up...yup...hung up without leaving a message. But it's okay, he will see my number appear on his caller ID, right? He will recognize that it was the number he had recently called and he will know, right? I do not have to feel guilty, right? WRONG!!! wrong, wrong, wrong! He did not see my number and he thought to himself that he obviously had had the wrong number and so it went. More life to live.
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