You Can Run But You Can't Hide

NOTE: I'm actually working on turning this real-life relationship into a story at some point, but I think I need to get some things out first.  If you have any ideas/thoughts/questions, please let me know!

I spent the better part of five years waiting on him: waiting on him to call me back, waiting on him to do what he had promised, waiting on him to be the person I needed, waiting on him to realize how much I was sacrificing by waiting.

What was he doing while I was waiting?  None of the above, that's for damn sure. 

It's easy to look back now through the cataracts of bitterness and say he never loved me.  Most days I think that's true, at least it was towards the end.  Did he respect me? Doubtful.  Did he appreciate me? Certainly not.  But I know the boy who sat two rows over from me in English class senior year fell in love with me, and maybe if life had gone a little differently for either of us we'd still be together.

Rihanna says "we found love in a hopeless place", which is just about the best summary of ill-fated love I've ever heard.  The first time we ever spoke was two months before graduation.  Eight weeks later he was my best friend.  By the beginning of the summer I had absolutely no doubt that I had fallen in love for the very first time. 

I hate to compare us to Grease or any other uptown-girl/downtown-boy story, but if I didn't make the reference you'd infer it and then think I was just being dramatic, so I'm putting it out there now.  He was in a gang and, I learned later, on the path to leaving high school but not to graduating.  I was on the tennis team for fuck's sake.  He already had a cigarette habit and I had never so much as snuck a beer out of the house.  I cringe now at how square I was (am?) but facts are facts.

It made no sense, really.  He was a stranger, the leader of the anti-popular-establishment.  There was every reason to think he would make fun of me and my upper-middle class ways, a fear of any high school student I imagine but certainly for yours truly.  And yet, there we were, running up our respective parents' phone bills talking on the phone for hours upon hours.  Me going to visit him and us spending all day doing nothing and talking about nothing and having the time of our lives in the way only 18-year-olds can do.  Him calling me every time my favorite song was on the radio, and calling me back four minutes later when the song went off.  Me for the first and maybe even only time in my life not caring what the other kids said about me and why I was friends with him. 

I can't explain any part of our relationship, from what the hell we were arguing about at 2 am to why we ever spoke to one another in the first place.  Some things just happen the way they do, and I won't pretend to have any more insight than that.  What I know is this.  I have always been shy and guarded and reserved, for reasons neither I nor my therapist understand.  But that boy was the first person I ever felt truly free enough to be myself with - to share my hopes and ask "what he thought about me" type questions and confide in and confess to.  It never even occurred to me to hold any part of myself back, and he never gave me a reason to.  Not then at least.

Not long after we met, we started to say "I love you" at the end of each conversation (which by then was every day, we quickly developed a talk-to-each-other-on-the-phone-every-day habit).  Not in the in love with you way, although that was bubbling underneath the surface as well.  But we did love each other, and somehow it made sense to say it.

It's important to tell you now that we weren't boyfriend & girlfriend.  I was going 1000 miles away to Florida for college in three months, and we weren't stupid enough to believe in a love that would rely solely on calling cards and collect phone calls (remember those?  ahhh, the 90s....).  Not that either of us didn't want that, it just really didn't make sense, and I think neither of us wanted to end up hating each other as the result of our long-distance relationship going bad.  In hindsight, I'm not entirely sure.  For all the hours spent on the phone, that's a conversation we never explicitly had.  We just reached that conclusion instinctively I guess.  So we were just friends.  But still somehow so much more than that.

Our story probably should have ended there.  We could look back fondly on that time and remember a time when our love was pure and simple.  I know conventional bumper-sticker wisdom says not to live a life wondering "what if", but knowing what I know now, I can say without a doubt I should have left that question unanswered.

In fact, it would have been easy to leave our story in the summer of 1996.  And for a while we did.  Sometime during my freshman year of college, I wrote him a letter which came back undeliverable.  Supposedly he and his mother had moved and he lost my contact info.  I should have been livid, and perhaps deep down under the facade of unflappability I've worked on since birth I was, but at the time I was so worried that to finally hear from him the following May (he called my phone back home once he figured I was back from school) I didn't care what the excuse was.  I should have fucking known then.  I did dare to ask why he didn't call my home at Christmas, but whatever flimsy answer I got I didn't have the courage to challenge, and he had in fact moved (that part at least was true), so I left it alone. Even if I'd fought the point, it probably wouldn't have changed much anyway.

By the end of freshman year, we'd already grown apart in a literal sense.  We had spent most of the past 8 months not speaking. I had developed a whole new cast of friends and daily habits and experiences.  There was a new boy that I talked to every day.  Lord only knows what he'd been doing.  If possible, we had even less in common than before. 

We could have let this blooming love die then.  Practically, we didn't go back to what we had the previous summer.  I don't remember if I spoke to him every day that following summer, but I don't think I did.  It would have been easy to just let it fade to black, let him just become somebody that I used to know (Gotye, for those not familiar with alternative music references), but for whatever reason neither of us would totally let the the other go.

And so, we existed in a love purgatory for the next several years.  My feelings for him never changed, per se, they were just overshadowed.  I'd begun a very serious relationship (yes, at 19...I've always been an idiot apparently) and there just wasn't room, or time, or propriety to keep him in my life in the same way.  But he was always there, in the shadows of my soul.