He was my first love and is not to be forgotten. Sitting at my desk with my typewriter, liberated as a woman journalist. I often peered at his office window down the aisle from me. You could see him through the mere cracks of the blinds with his work clothes on, with his tie gradually getting looser from yanking on it all day. Lynol helped me get this job since he is well acquainted with the man behind the blinds. The man would sway back and forth across the room frantically, to keep everyone in check. I was contemplating on what my next article should be, when I heard him walking towards me. My heart beat followed every step he made. He leaned over to tell me about a dinner meeting with a client that he wanted me to join with him for that tonight and slipped a note with the details with the last sentence catching my eye,“Pick you up at 7.” My heart beat ran faster. I rushed home after five to put on my new slim black dress, powdered my face and dashed on red lips. He waited for me down stairs by his car. The dinner went great and we ended up having a couple more drinks together after everyone had left. Sinking into the music and voices that surrounded us we spontaneously began sitting closer together with our shoulders or knees occasionally slipping past each other when we laughed. In the next few weeks we went out for more dinners, not only work related. I knew he had a wife and children though. I had seen their pictures on his office desk. We never spoke of the subject and before long when our fingers would briefly brush against each other, but then it went from a tender yearning, to a constant reminder of our separate duties. We were not meant to be. Lynol detected our tension long ago. It would be years where I would stand in the corner of the room with my glass of Champagne at our office parties while he and his family are being admired upon in the center of the room. His wife was a wealthy woman and his business would have not built up till this day, if it was not for her. A couple months later I got a job offering from a big newspaper publishing establishment in New York. There was no way I could refuse. Lynol and I came across each other in a short years ahead, where now he insists on taking care of me and my daughter Emily, who is now 2 years old. That following year we decided to go back and visit our families. While walking back from the streets from taking Emily down to the market to buy some flowers, we bumped into the man in who is still in his loose shirt and tie. After I told Emily to say greeting to my old friend before we went and crossed the street. The man was still standing still across the street gazing into my little girl’s eyes and then to mine. This man’s name was Jeffery Howard.
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