While growing up, I seemed to have collected scars and burns from all sorts of events. This wasn’t a hobby, instead, it was the reality of my existence. These marks on my body were signs I neither followed the rules or heeded the ways of those who went before me. Perhaps, I chose a new path they feared to explore leaving me with the life long signs of achievement. Or, they were reminders I didn’t pay attention. Regardless, scars and burns are symbols of our past journeys, successes and failures.
One night, when Jojo boarded the Harley, she threw her leg over the seat and mounted the bike where her jeans raised up revealing her right calf. Without a thought, her leg came down onto the shiny silver exhaust pipe where instantly the pipe seared her skin forever burning Jojo leaving behind a symbol of the rides on her body. To this day I’m not certain what that symbolizes to Jojo, whether those rides were a success or failure.
What I do know is how the choices I made when getting closer to Jojo turned out to be the best decisions I could have made. Had I chosen to grow intimate with her, I would have lost her. How do I show this woman that she is the only woman in the world that matters. I do it by leaving with the intent to return to find her again. I was too young and immature at that time. Yes, I was older than her, yet I was immature and simply not ready. Choosing to stay and grow intimate would have scarred her for life leaving me behind in purgatory.
What needed to happen was I had to leave her, then, return, only when I was better prepared and had learned to become a man.
My travels had taken me too many places and had seen too many things I couldn’t describe. To the point I had lost track of who I had become. A father, a leader, a husband, a lover or nothing?
Looking back, I made the best choices I could with what I knew at that time. I have no regrets, only pain she is gone. It would take me seven years to learn I was a good man and not what I feared deep within. Jojo was the reason I made those choices.
The time spent with Jojo became my scar burned deep within my heart. She and Little Man both taught me how love of any kind within our short life should never be taken for granted.
