In 1961, I was 17, young and dumb. In June of that year, I ran away from home in Kentucky with my high school boyfriend and eloped to Memphis on a Greyhound bus. Yesterday, I was back in Memphis 47 years later and discovered that the Greyhound Bus station, where we had our wedding dinner, is still standing, still in operation. Next door was a new Doubletree Inn replacing the hotel where we spent the night before we were married, so afraid the desk clerk would ask us for i.d.s, so afraid the police would call my mother. Yesterday, a friend took my picture in front of the bus station, and I thought, dear god who was that clueless 17 year old who wore her virginal-white high school graduation dress to her runaway wedding in front of a judge in some little Tennessee town whose name I no longer remember? I felt so tender toward that other me, and I thought how 11 years spent at the hands of a brutal guy can leave scars that still have numb edges after all this time. How, despite years of therapy, I’ve never lost my hunger for happy endings. (Don’t we all want Elvis to wake up in Graceland, drug-free, reunited with Priscilla and fit as a fiddle?) Little did I know that the long ride back home as “wife” took me farther and farther away from the girl whose tender spots could have been stroked and encouraged to grow instead of beaten and calloused over. And now all these years later, I have a big full-of-friends life and a wonderful job and creative work I love…but when I flew home tonight, there was a reunited couple at the airport who couldn’t keep their hands off each other — their attraction was electric–and I realized there was no significant other who missed me while I was gone, that years ago I bought a ticket to ride and it took me to some fantastic places but it also included a stop at heartbreak hotel and maybe part of me is still there, wandering the halls of the Doubletree Inn, wondering how to turn back time.

A friend brought me this amulet from Beirut and I need to dig it out and wear it until I come to my senses. I can always tell that I’m running away from something about myself or my life when I start fantasizing about my high school boyfriend. It’s an idiotic spell I’ve never been able to break completely, but when a boy teaches you to have an orgasm when you’re 14 and he’s 17, he’s going to have a hold on your psychic erotic imagination like Gorilla Glue. Especially when you’re a virgin and you meet on your first day of high school and you spend the next year parking and groping on every gravel road in the county after the Friday night football game where he throws the winning pass or whatever. And you get out of the car after a night of “Splendor in the Grass” almost-sex with your lips swollen and blood-flushed with that pent-up libido look that grown women pay to have injected in their lips long after it no longer fits. Throughout the years, we’ve hooked up and drifted apart, gone decades without a word, and eventually found each other again through relatives or mutual friends. The first phone calls are always like coming home, but it quickly ends in tears or mutual disappointment or a big shrug as we go on with our real lives. And it will never end any other way because we’re always just trying to find our way back to the first day we saw each other, to that tearing open of our virgin hearts that could only come once in that exact way, that wasn’t meant to deal with past-due bills, homework, ambition, colonoscopies, or morning breath. Because it was perfect just the way it was, when it was.