My eternal love forever began at a poetry slam in high school. Shyly, you approached the stage at one end of the old school gym, the veneered hardwood floor creaking beneath your feet. Some folding chairs had been set up for the few students expected to attend. At the other end, a couple of boys were practicing shots at the basketball hoop. A teacher rose from her chair on stage and called your name.

“Patrick McGee will be reading ‘Eternal Love.’ Patrick?”

The teacher sat down, and you took the center-stage position. Pushing your hair away from your eyes, you recited without reading, looking upward toward the florescent-lighted ceiling.

“Without clock or compass

Is my love for you.”

Hearing those words was a jolt, as if I had been slapped hard. I actually put my hand to my stinging cheek. In that moment, I understood that I loved you deeply. As your words implied, my love was beyond time and space. It pre-existed both of us and would endure after our deaths. This was a truth I recognized right away. It was not a discovery. It was a re-discovery of something I always knew but never before understood.

That was the first time I saw your or heard your name on this earthly plane. You, like the others, had probably already noticed me before hurriedly averting your eyes. Unless it was to laugh at me and call me by my odious nick-name: “The Gimp.” Or to stick a foot out to try to trip me and cause one of my falls, the more humiliating the better, as when my shirt rode up, exposing a roll of fat around my mid-section.

On this earthly plane, I limped badly because of the scoliosis and my one leg being shorter than the other.

“Would you put on your god-damned leg-brace,” my mother would yell.

I hated wearing it. It was a cheap kind that rubbed my skin raw. And it drew even more negative attention my way. Each school day, I would take it off in a bathroom stall and leave it in my locker.

That was thirty years ago. Today, we are both forty-five. Over time, my love for you has only grown. I have never married or had a lover. I have never had a date. No one has ever kissed me. Yet, I can imagine your naked body, with lush black hair covering your limbs, chest, and back, like the pelt of a sleek black cat. Although I have never seen a male member, I picture your manliness with all the desire a woman-in-love is capable of. Even if in middle age you have gained weight and lost hair, I still see you as the beautiful boy reading his poem on a high school stage.

You are what has kept me going through years of cruel surgeries, chronic pain, and isolation. Disability checks are my only source of income. It makes no difference. My needs are simple. I live with my aging mother and still sleep in my childhood bed. I have a few items of clothing, a few books, a laptop, a small tv. They suffice because I have you, dear Patrick. Maybe not on this earthly plane, but in eternity, I know you are mine.

I have kept track of you through the years. You went to a university and earned an MFA in creative writing. You teach English in the same high school we both attended. You have published two books of poetry (which I own and have memorized). You are married to a woman named Cindy (no matter!) and have two children. That is all very temporary. We have the infinite ahead of us. Whether or not you ever come to love me, my love is strong enough to bind us together forever.

Here is an example of my love. Last week, I saw you through the window of a coffee-shop. Without looking your way, I entered, placed an order, then took a seat in the back where I could watch you. When you left, I quickly moved to your table before it could be bussed. There lay some treasures. A wadded paper napkin that I shoved into my pocketbook. The fork you had used to eat your snack and the spoon for your coffee. Both of these I put in my mouth and licked. A bonus was a small amount of coffee puddled in the bottom of your mug. This I drank, hoping that I was ingesting a tiny amount of your saliva—of you. Similarly, I placed the bits of your leftover cake on my tongue. Knowing some small crumbs of you were within me, I was happy for the rest of the day.

My joy may have been the cause of the onset of the fever I have had for the past few days. I am very sensitive, and any overstimulation can weaken my immune system. My wearied mother had to drive me to the chilly emergency room again. It irritated her because of the no smoking policy in the hospital. So many hours without a cigarette there.

I must have been delirious because I could distinctly hear your voice;

Without clock or compass

Is my love for you.

In my fevered state, I first imagined that you were saying those words to me. But then, I had a vision. In it you were saying those words, not to me as I had fervently wished, but to your young daughter. She would be fourteen or fifteen now, and a student at our old high school. I had seen her many times while sitting in my parked car across the street from the school, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. You would drive into the staff parking lot in the morning. Often, your daughter would be riding with you. Sometimes, you placed a hand on her shoulder while you both walked to the entrance. It made my own shoulder ache.

While waiting for you to come out of the school again at the end of the day, I had seen her in the school yard. She was a popular girl with many friends. With her long straight back and athlete’s build, she played volley ball and was on the girl’s basketball team. I watched you watch her at practices.

Never before had I reacted to her one way or another. But in the emergency room, before being admitted, I ground my teeth with loathing. Just as my love for you had been instantaneous those thirty years ago, my hatred for your daughter stunned me with its terrible sudden force. Though the night in my hospital bed, I twisted the sheets and alarmed the staff with my rising blood pressure. The call bell from the vital signs machine kept going off.  It was an omen. It meant that your daughter was not to be tolerated. She was the one making me ill.

Now I have been discharged on three antibiotics. I am still required to take medications for my other conditions as well as for the side-effects from the medications: weight gain, constipation, suicidal thoughts. Often, I do wish I could die to be out of my suffering and with you instead.

But first, I now realize, I must do something about your daughter. She is stealing what is rightfully mine! I cannot allow it.

Thinking of Sandy Hook and Parkland, I now understand those school shooters. One or more the students they killed may have had something that really belonged to the shooter, whether or not it was apparent on this earthly plane. You could tell by the reactions of the parents and friends who were shown weeping on tv that the murdered children had been good-looking, popular, loved. No one asked if the love had been stolen from someone who may have been damaged or unattractive.

This has to be corrected. A plan is forming in my mind.

Fortunately, even though he died ten years ago, my mother never disposed of my father’s gun collection. I am used to rifles from accompanying him during hunting season. But I never tried the pride of his collection: pistols that are fitted with Glock magazines. I will take one from the gun cabinet and familiarize myself with it. I may soon need it.

I am now in the habit of parking across the street from the school with one or more of the loaded pistols. When the right time comes, I will end this long wait. I will punish the daughter of my beloved. He will forgive me, knowing that chastising her has been necessary. Together, we will leave this earthly plane and begin our time as one, without clock or compass.

Any day now….

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Carolyn Geduld is a mental health professional in Bloomington, Indiana. She is an emerging fiction writer with acceptances in Persimmon Tree; Writing Disorder; Not Your Mother’s Breastmilk (published), Pennsylvania Literary Journal; Magnolia Tree.

Photo: Zoltan Tasi