Different Worlds
Part 4
It was on a night a little over a year after I had first met Sam that she took me out for coffee, saying that she had something to tell me. She explained that she had decided to move west, where she had an offer of work on a farm run by some friends. I knew she had been feeling shiftless lately, and was looking for some way to ground herself, so this didn't come as too much of a surprise.
Sam had explained many times that for her, nothing lasted forever, and nothing was certain except change. My relationship with her had always seemed like a gift, like a precious thing which I was to have for a while but yet was never truly mine. Sam certainly was far too autonomous and free a spirit to belong to just one person forever, and that had been clear from the moment I met her. This made me value each day with her even more, because all along it had been clear that this was a state of affairs that couldn't last. Lots of people settle down and take jobs and save up for a retirement fund, but Sam just wasn't one of those people, and probably never would be. And although part of me wished that Sam would be in my life forever or at least for several years, I knew that if I had my wish it would make Sam into a somehow different sort of person, and in keeping her I would have lost something in her soul. So I was happy for her, and happy for the time we had shared together, because I knew that her departure had to be.
In my time with Sam I had seen many different things. She had introduced me to an entire subculture I had previously only seen from the outside, and I loved it. I'll always have her to thank for meeting those people.
I remember a coffee house she took me to once which was a fundraiser for some sort of grassroots political campaign. There was this magnificent woman there who read a poem about the beauty of life. She was a paraplegic confined to a motorized wheelchair who breathed through an artificial ventilator connected to a hole in her trachea because her diaphragm didn't work, and her poem was about how thanks to her trach hole she could eat pussy for hours without coming up for air. After the scheduled performances, some women started doing improvised contact dance, which seemed to involve a lot of flirting with each other, while some guy played an accordion and another played a doumbek.
Another time, she took me to a week-long gathering in the woods, where people spent a lot of time drumming around a campfire and making out in the long grass of the field beside it. I'll never forget one night when we were high on a little pot but much more on the thrill of frantically dancing together all night. We dropped our clothes at the shore of the lake and swam out a short ways to a raft moored in the swimming area. There, under a cloudless sky so clear you could see the milky way, we fucked for hours. I completely lost count of the number of times Sam brought me to climax, screaming as loud as I could across the lake. At some of the campfires, I flirted with other women, stole a quick feel and rubbed up against them, but I only ever left holding hands with Sam.
I also learned that when you are seeing someone of the same gender, it's a lot easier to sneak into the same public washroom for a quickie without raising suspicions. Sam and I were once walking through an art gallery, but I hadn't seen her in a few days and found I was having trouble concentrating on all the pictures of naked women because I kept thinking of how Sam looked naked on my bed. I was teasing her by putting my arm around her and surreptitiously stroking her breast, so Sam marched off to the closest women's washroom with me in tow and fingered me to orgasm as I sat on a toilet seat. After that, I teased her in public more often.
Previous to Sam, my entire sexual experience had consisted of two men I had dated in University, who were alright but in retrospect not particularly memorable. Their idea of sex was to always do the same things in the same order, and to stop when they came. With Sam, though, there was always a surprise and something new to discover. We might kiss and slowly rub our crotches together until we came, or Sam might tie my ankles and wrists to the frame of my futon, blindfold me, and fuck me with a strap-on. Once she poured a bottle of maple syrup on me and spent the next hour licking it off, and another time we finger-painted each other's bodies with chocolate pudding.
The last time I ever saw Sam was nothing like that, though. It was almost a year and a half after she had first headed west and we had had an emotional goodbye at the bus station. (Sam had planned to hitchhike, but I insisted on buying her a bus ticket.) She had travelled back once already to visit her friends in this city, and although I greatly enjoyed the visit I could tell that our relationship had changed, and that this was merely a reprise and an echo of what had been. This time, she was keeping a friend company on a road trip across the country, and would only be in town for one night. Sam stayed with me while her friend slept somewhere else. I was too discreet to inquire as to the nature of their friendship, and I knew that it didn't matter to me anymore: it was alright with me as long as Sam was happy, and she assured me that she was.
The farm hadn't done so well, but Sam had found decent work in a cafe, and was living with people she really got along with, as far as I could tell. Sam isn't much of one for keeping in touch through letters, and although I had assured her before she left that I'd love to get collect calls from her anytime, there weren't very many after a few on the road and one when she arrived safely at the farm where she had worked for a while. For my part, I told her that I had been promoted a few times to greater responsibilities at the library, and might start managing a branch somewhere, perhaps in another city. Sam was happy for me.
We drank too much wine and stayed up late talking about our lives and reminiscing. We swapped stories about silly things we had done together, and kidded each other as only former lovers can. Ever a keen observer, Sam spotted a photo on a shelf of a woman with her children, and I told her about Meghann, who I had been dating for half a year now, and who had two young children from a previous marriage. I told her about how things were starting to get pretty serious for us, but that so far we still had separate places. For her part, Sam told me about a few girls she had met out west and dated for a while.
Eventually, we prepared for bed and turned in. Through unspoken agreement, Sam joined me in my bedroom and took the same side of the bed she'd always had, and I settled in with my head resting on her shoulder, like so many nights before. I was full of nostalgia as I draped my arm across her, and she sighed. "You know, I've missed you a lot, Rachel", Sam told me.
"I've missed you, too. You'll always be special to me, love."
I felt small tears begin to form in my eyes, and I don't think my emotion was just from the wine. Sam looked over, and leaned forward to kiss me. I shut my eyes, and kissed her softly on the lips, then once again more deeply. Then we broke apart, and went to sleep in each other's arms.
Sam was gone the next morning, and was probably an hour's drive away by the time I woke up. Other than an extra dirty wine glass in the sink and a slight odour on my spare pillow, she might never have been there.
Shortly after that visit, I moved to take a job in a city several hours away. The job was a step up to managing my own branch, and it was in the city where Meghann had been accepted to university, since she wanted to go back to school. We've been living together ever since, and her kids call me Mom now too. I haven't seen Sam in the past five years, and have no idea where she might be. The people I met while I was with Sam who were part of the youth street culture have long since scattered to the winds, so I wouldn't even know where to start looking.
I'll never forget Sam, though. I'm forever in her debt for introducing me to whole new worlds I had never experienced, in so many ways. She touched my life forever. I know I'll probably never see her again, but sometimes when I see a young woman passing the time on a street corner downtown in my new city, I'm reminded of Sam. And I always think back, and smile.
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Thanks for reading my story. If you liked it, please write and say so. It means a lot to me. Love, Jess.