Desirous of Everything at the Same Time

Chapter One

Adeline Martin may have resided in a housing development divided from mine, but to me, she was "the girl next door." She was neither my Winnie Cooper nor my Mary Jane and I was not her all-American, baseball card collecting, bicycle riding, tree house conquering boy. She was my Adeline Martin and I was her Louis Warner. 

What we held was special–the emotional equivalent of a South African diamond or a Ming Dynasty vase. The relationship we possessed was incomparable to any Hollywood conceived connection. Our conversations were unscripted and our endeavors were undirected, but boy, did we put on one hell of a show. The link we shared was not similar to those of any other people I knew. Adeline and I did not possess the same background, education, or living situation, but during my junior and senior year of high school, we shared experiences in the same abandoned community between both our neighborhoods where we idly wasted the remnants of our volatile youth. We had no mutual friends, but the fictitious ones we fabricated to enrich the fake life we built in order to escape our individual monotonous existences. We had no working relationship prior to the one we developed while renovating the vacant house we identified as our home. I may have had little knowledge regarding her past and present, but I still knew I was a part of both. No matter what common threads unraveled, we were tightly woven into the intricate fabric of each other's lives. No matter what events may have transpired separately in our own families, I retained the unwavering certitude that I could always find her waiting for me every weekend in those forsaken suburbs outside of the town limits of Riverport, California.

*****

It was an early April Sunday morning as I stepped out of my suburban home and inhaled the air drifting from across the delta downtown, which had the hint of wild fish, farmer's market produce, and the sweat released from hard labour. I swept my fingers through my disordered dark, spiky hair as my eyes smiled with the rays of the rising sun. I knew that it was going to be a good day because it was the one-year anniversary of when Adeline and I met.

I picked up my vintage blue cruiser resting on the side of my family's white picket fence that I had postponed painting for a few months and tried to secure it on the bicycle rack of my Volkswagen Beetle for my date with Adeline, which for the offspring of former competitive cyclists proved to be quite the challenge. Adeline had organized "Le Tour de Riverport" the day prior. We planned to ride our bicycles down the highway outside of Riverport and lend ourselves to wherever the road would take us along the way. 

Adeline detested compiling and composing a schedule for our meetings more than twenty-four hours before the prearranged time of the activity. Adeline liked the feeling of our ventures being somewhat spontaneous, even though most of the propositions for the places we went to or the pastimes we engaged in originated from an Adventure Time spiral notebook that she constantly wrote in. I regularly puzzled over what she diligently scribbled in the pages of that diary, and sometimes encouraged the fantasy that she wrote about me. She informed me on numerous occasions that she was composing a memoir, and I always wondered if the scrawls and doodles that comprised the writing tablet were entries in the potential, pending New York Times bestseller. I imagined that if she were to die before me, her journal would be held in some respected museum in a display case for the viewing pleasure of all of her admirers. I visualized myself having to maneuver and dance through a complex field of laser beams in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to steal the notebook and uncover the truth in the sacred text that had plagued me, and most likely other men before me.

When my bicycle was finally situated steadily above the trunk of my car, I entered my bedroom. After emerging victorious from a tug-of-war fight with my closest door, I made my way through a stack of boxes piled to the brim with souvenirs of my adolescence. My parents did not particularly like the fact that I kept worthless relics or that these items happened to accumulate so much space, so I stopped trying to convince them of their symbolic significance for me a long time ago. My parents sometimes labeled me a hoarder. Personally, I preferred the term, "Memory Collector."