Missing Words
Music: Eyes Without A Face
Artist: Billy Idol
Shared by: Karl for Beverley
“I still have those same conversations with her and hope somehow she knows that she was the only real love in my life.”
In 1984, as a 20 year old working in a local bar, I saw her. Beverley. Younger than me, breathtakingly beautiful, and everything stopped apart from my heartbeat. I instantly fell in love, the only time in my life that this really happened to me.
Over the next 12 months we became friends. She would drive up to my parents house in her bright yellow Ford Escort, always with Billy Idols’ “Rebel Yell” album blasting out of the car tape deck stereo system. I never plucked up the courage to explain to her the effect she had on me, the privilege I felt just being in her company. Just being able to spend time with her was the highlight of my young, and probably whole, life.
Over the years we went in separate directions, occasionally bumping into each other. The years passed, I had hundreds of imagined conversations with her where I finally got the courage just to tell her how much she had, and always would mean to me.
5 years ago her obituary appeared in a local newspaper. She had died from a very aggressive form of cancer and deteriorated very quickly post diagnosis. Towards the end of her life she had married.
Her husband had requested that anyone who had known her, over the period of her lifetime, contact him to fill in the huge gaps he had in her history. I contacted him to say I was a ‘friend’, that she had been a part of my life briefly but that I could never hear Billy Idols’ song ‘Eyes Without A Face’ without being transported back to 1984 and her bright yellow Ford Escort. He thanked me and said she died peacefully.
I still have those same conversations with her and hope somehow she knows that she was the only real love in my life.