Night of shining amour

IMAGINE the scene — I’ve been seduced by a night of drunken debauchery immersed in small town mentality, surrounded by my demons (two of whom I’ve just overcome), and I’m now being chatted up by a random.
I feel a pat on my shoulder, and turn round to be faced with my first love.
Suddenly, I’m transported almost 15 years back in time to the local park, wearing cerise leggings and a cerise polka dot top which had invariably been bought from a clubby book. When I say polka dot I mean in Twister-like proportions.
I’m happily cycling around, on my equally cerise bike (I think I can see where my aversion to pink stems from), when around the corner a youth on a bike comes flying towards me, showing no mercy.
If the eighties’ equivalent of a white stead was a BMX, my knight in shining shellsuit then appeared from nowhere and came to my resuce. He went mad at the kamikaze biker for scaring me and told him that if he messed with me, he messed with him and that was not a good plan.
I now see that it was a complete set up, but at the time I fell for it. He was my hero.
We held hands all day (probably about an hour), and just before I left, he kissed me with the most delicate kiss and asked me to be his girlfriend.
When I told my boy-space-friends at school that I had a boyfriend, and who it was, they immediately warned me off him — basically because he was from the other school and so was obviously bad news.
It was nothing to worry about anyway because I never saw him again. He was filed away and I probably wouldn’t have recalled him, had it not been for this weekend. In fact, I’m writing this, surprising myself at how much I actually remember.
It was one of those ‘I know you, I do, I know you’ moments when I turned to face him. He had me at hello. That, however is the extent of my debauched memory.
The morning after the night before, I tried desperately to piece together what had been said. I’m sure one of the first things I said was I used to love him and that he’d grown up to be a ‘nice young man’. I hope I stopped myself from pinching his cheek. And what cheekbones they are!
I definitely remember him asking if the random, who at this point had put his arm around me in an ‘excuse me but we’re in the middle of something’ manner, was my boyfriend, and me asking him if his girlfriend was with him. I thought it would have been a waste of time to ask if he actually had one and so presumed that he would have to — looking that good. But no, she wasn’t because no he didn’t.
There seemed to be a pink haze all around him and I could hear or see no one but him. We just stood there smiling at each other. We had a moment.
I woke with a start, and a warm, fuzzy sense of confusion — as if he had been the last thing I’d seen before I’d fallen asleep.
Was he really as nice as that? Had my mind gone into slow-mo overdrive and it had merely been but a fleeting glance? It felt like it had lasted forever, but my mind was numb and not differentiating between fantasy and reality.
All I wanted to do was sleep but I couldn’t get his image out of my head. Now, three days on, the fragments are fading and I can barely remember what he looks like.
I wonder if in 15 years time we would meet again — Brigadoon style in the same place at the same time?
I figure the reality is I’ll probably meet him next weekend, and every weekend for the next fifteen years, and be sick of the sight of him.
It was all worth it, however, for reminding me of such a silly story from my youth.
And for reminding me how grateful I am that I now buy my own clothes.