My daughter’s fortieth birthday is soon, and I’m looking for something special for her. It’s a tradition in our family. At particular milestones, the mother gifts the celebrant with a special piece of jewelry, other “heirloom” from her own life. I’m looking for a piece of my history—something of me to stay with her as she moves toward all she’s becoming. When I turned forty, my mother surprised me by crocheting a lovely blue throw that I still can snuggle under on cold nights. I don’t have time to create something, so I sort through my jewelry box, looking for just the right thing.

Opening an old velvet box, I’m ambushed by the sight of the small, lovely St. Christopher necklace you gave me. I’m jerked back in time; no longer looking to the future. It was your final Christmas gift, opened that night we traveled to a place neither of us could come home from. It was the night you broke my heart. 


When I was sixteen and you were eighteen, we’d been girlfriend and boyfriend across five years of off-and-on early romance. At first, we held hands in the hall at school, snuck kisses at ballgames and behind the church, and passed notes in study hall. For a time, we lived in a seemingly endless cycle. We’d be together and happy. We’d break up to “try on” other partners. Then we’d eventually break up with them and find our ways back to each other for another round.

The postage-stamp phase of our affair began when my mother moved my sisters and me away from our small hometown. “Togetherness” for the two of us was limited to times I spent with my grandparents, just blocks from your house. On our first “real” date, we celebrated my fourteenth birthday. It was a week away, but this was the weekend we could coordinate to be together. You took me to dinner and a show—actually it was a hamburger at the local diner and a drive-in movie. I was just shy of fourteen, and the ink on your driver’s license was still damp. At the drive-in, we found magical privacy in your ten-year-old Chevelle’s film-lit darkness.

Then your family moved also, to a town even further away from me. During coordinated, simultaneous grandparent visits, the drive-in’s dark isolation was our haven. Weekly, sometimes daily, letters proclaimed our loneliness and our desires. Shared, tiny intimacies of high school life made us feel closer. At some point, we decided to be “us” forever. Our babies would have your blue eyes. You’d direct the band; I’d teach biology. I felt safely loved.

On what I recall as the “St. Christopher Christmas,” I was sixteen, and you were eighteen. We had exchanged our gifts. I gave you an engraved ID bracelet, and you gave me the silver St. Christopher necklace. After fastening it around my neck, you pulled me to you and kissed me. We lay back in the car seat, reaching for each other, giggling, in our familiarity with each other as we moved into new, unfamiliar explorations.

Later, in the drive-in’s darkness, I started a conversation I quickly realized I wasn’t ready to have. My back was against the car door as you leaned against me, stroking my hair. I looked into your blue eyes and asked you if you felt as I felt—sure and solid that you were as much in love as I was. Then, and even now, I wonder why I asked you that. The best story I can offer myself is that I felt so close to you in that moment. We were alone, in your car, in this space where we’d shared so much intimacy over the years. Just moments after we’d moved that to new a new level of closeness. I think in that moment I wanted to express my love for you. I wanted to hear about your love for me.

But you just said, “I don’t think so,” and then you started to talk. You did a lot of talking that night, describing your involvement with another girl. She lived closer to you than I did. She went to high school with you. You decided she’d have a life with you—the life we had planned for me. You just kept talking about her. You wouldn’t shut up as I felt my heart shred into little pieces. You took me “home” to my Granny’s house—the last trip I took in that old Chevelle.

A year or so later, you married that other girl, and she had your blue-eyed babies. Eventually I married someone else and had his brown-eyed babies.

I am not sure why I married that man, except maybe I just wanted a family. I told myself—and him—that I was in love. It was the “expected way” in the small-town cultures where I grew up. We were fine together for a while. I finished college and started teaching school. He took a job at the bank, and settled into what was to be his career. We bought a house. We eventually had two brown-eyed girls. We experienced the usual trials, celebrations, and challenges that most families do.

But then things just weren’t okay. He’d work in the evenings—and come home late. Your absence continued to haunt me, even though I knew we’d never be “us” again. Ultimately after ten years, I realized, or I convinced myself, that I just couldn’t see me growing old with him—not in the same way I had seen that future with you. I asked him to move out on Easter Sunday, and we divorced in early July. Our brown-eyed girls became “my” girls, and the three of us began to build our own life. Eventually we moved across the country a few times as I took new jobs, moving up the ladder in new school districts.

After a time, I learned that you weren’t with her. You were with your own “him” and had moved even further away. Years later, after my second cross-country move, Mom’s call pronounced your death—murdered by someone hating who you’d become—maybe who you always were. That news re-opened scars in my battered heart.

As I hold the St. Christopher, I find that my sadness now—while it’s still sometimes overwhelming—is less about losing you and more about your absence from the planet. St. Christopher’s all I have of you, beyond lovely memories and unforgettable, inescapable heartbreak.

So I kiss the cold, silver medal, placing it in its box. I move on, exploring other options for my daughter to celebrate her milestone birthday. Finally I select the star opal ring her father had given me as a wedding gift. I wrap it, grateful for that brown-eyed baby who’s grown up in my heart for almost forty years.

I know I’ll keep moving on, living life, relishing the joys and challenges as they come. And I will continue to remember you, as I have done since that night when even a bright and shiny St. Christopher couldn’t protect this traveler.

-Royce Holladay

Royce Holladay, is a self-proclaimed "hunter/gatherer/sharer" of ideas, insights, and possibility. Looking at the world through multiple lenses, she gathers, explores, and catalogs new patterns and unexpected perspectives. Royce loves a slow, growing recognition, as well as great bursts of ideas. She also relishes in discovering something that’s new and a slightly off kilter. Royce has written professionally-oriented non-fiction for years and has only recently discovered the joy of writing other genre, most specifically flash memoir and poetry. She seeks the immediate gratification of laying foundations of a whole story in less than 1000 words. Then she delights in the slow mining of that piece to release her story in just the right combination of words. She shares her stories and poems, designed to provide that slow, growing awareness or the quick burst of new ideas, hoping her readers enjoy them as much as she does.