First Dates....Kind of

We unwrapped our sandwiches and sat at the bench, while I picked at my food, too nervous to really eat the food, which was problematic because a pair of hornets started menacing us, and we briefly swatted at them before eventually retreating and ceding the sandwiches to them. Year later, I’d have used the joke that I always do now, running away from the bee frantically and saying, “I’m sorry that I’m so scared. I’m actually allergic to bees,” which tends to make the other person excuse your prissiness and pushing them in the lower back towards said bees. And after a while, twenty minutes or so, I might let it slide that I’m not actually allergic to bees but that I really didn’t like getting stung by them because it hurts. I didn’t have it in me back then, and who knows what sort of unmanliness she perceived in my retreat from the sandwiches. 

There are stark moments in one’s life that you remember forever. Of course, there are also other bits that are like detritus, stuck in the branches of trees, an old song lyric, an afternoon at the house of an old babysitter that sit side by side with those other, seemingly full memories. As we stood beneath the Live Oaks, the heat sucking the life from the day she asked me a terrible question. She said, “Is this like a date?” 

My heart started racing as it did nearly every time I spoke with, or imagined speaking with someone of the opposite sex, except, this time, rather critically, I was actually in the presence of someone of the opposite sex, who I had developed feelings for over the course of the past three months, talked to, laughed with, etc. etc. I was going to ask her to prom even, but someone else swooped in. Talking to her, spending time on the bench, was ostensibly like pulling teeth, minus the novacaine and the pulled teeth. Okay, it was perhaps not the aptest of metaphors. 

And in that interim of a moment that seemed like it could last forever, I could have said anything. The echo of all the words that any two people have said to one another hung in the air, but reader, I said yes. Sadly, this was not Jane Eyre. Stomach rumbling I walked back to the bench and sat on top of it. She closed the space between us and sat next to me. 

She told me that in the time between the end of school and the start of summer she’d started hanging out with someone else. The guy was the star of the football team and went on to play at the local Juco, small and quick. He was also incredibly nice and smiled and laughed often. In comparison, I had to offer the fact that I’d beaten Shining Force at least 2x already that summer. What do you say to that? I didn’t protest. I didn’t say much of anything at all. I wished her luck in dating, and I took back the parts of myself that had been exposed, and I started putting them back together.

I don’t remember if I cried. To be clear, such a state would not have been unusual. I remember the shocked disbelief when she spoke of him, the almost lightless feeling your body gets when you’re in pain. If ever I was to believe in a soul, it would be in those moments, when the words are too much to bare, and you suddenly see yourself in two places, one, still trapped in that useless body, the other, pulling and tugging to get out, and yet we are mired anyway inside ourselves, standing in the foyer of your house, an ornate lamp overhead, tan tiles, a white wall, making small talk about the guy she’s now seeing.

11th grade dates

We drove the rest of the way through avenues of oaks, my hand still wrestling nervously, the pockets of shade a respite from the warmth of those mid-summer days. I drove the car slowly and inexpertly, asking for her advice on where to park, conscious of her every movement, the positioning of her left hand on the seat, her denim shorts, and the bits of white skin, pricked red by heat. As I recall it now, she blushed often too, or perhaps her complexion was just red. Who really remembers anything accurately? 

She was wearing a teal t-shirt that complimented, quite nicely the blue in her eyes. If not for nerves, I could have driven forever down those darkened roads, driving in a car next to a girl I found attractive, looking for somewhere to stop. Finally, she pointed to a small pull off, and I parked the car, yanking the wheel hard to the left because the car was one of the last to lack power steering, which meant you had to pull it hand over hand like a ship’s wheel in a storm in order to turn it properly, a Toyota Eagle with a trunk that leaked in the rain, leaving the faint smell of mold in the car throughout the winter and sometimes deepened by the heat in summer months. In short, the sort of car that girls love. 

We moved out underneath the oaks, through the star thistle and towards the old bench situated near the grill. The grill was turned up, a few spare ashes that hadn’t yet been blown away by the wind. What does it feel like to get your heart broken? The term first appears in the 1580’s, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that it originated in the last 50 years or so in pop songs. Of course, that’s simply not true as the term has been extant for nearly half a millennia. To be clear, what happens next didn’t exactly break my heart. Technically someone suffering from broken heart syndrome experiences a severe physical pain that’s somewhat akin to heart attack, though the chances of you dying from it are nearly nil. And yet, suffering overwhelming emotional distress associated with heartbreak (we tend to associate the term with lost relationships, which is perhaps the most universal, but people who have lost loved ones, parents, siblings etc. should probably be thought of right along with the typical end of relationship feeling if we’re being smart about it) is a real thing. This is all nearly a non-sequitur as I didn’t have the sorts of strong feelings for this particular girl that would result in heartbreak. Though I was quite sad, but I suppose I’ve skipped over a critical portion of the story here and should probably get back to it. 

The heat was oppressive that day, withering the brown and golden bits of thistle and grass, and she had a thin bead of sweat that ran perpendicular across the top of her lip. She had red cheeks and smiled very frequently, which was useful because I was very frequently nervous and needed encouragement to keep talking and smiling at me and laughing frequently, a deep sort of throaty thing, was precisely what I needed in order to keep talking to her. If she didn’t laugh frequently and smile frequently I’d have probably blushed my way into oblivion. 

I don’t remember her ever seeming particularly nervous. I think the thing that made her the most nervous was probably how nervous I was to be sitting next to her on a bench outside of her father’s math class where I was trying to blunder my way into B- by constantly asking for help. I don’t remember precisely what we used to talk about, though perhaps it was something about the contours of the day, or the people that we knew in common, things said in class. I was a junior in high school so nothing could have been of particular interest. 

I was neither charming nor particularly interesting back then, primarily because I felt and quite frankly was, entirely misunderstood. Everyone conceived of me as this extraordinarily shy guy who didn’t really want to engage, particularly with girls. This was patently untrue, though it didn’t help that I was often shy, particularly around girls and didn’t really talk to them. But it was always annoying that people couldn’t see into my heart of hearts, where I was always wanting to talk, especially to pretty girls, rather than paying attention only to my outer self, who was shy and scared to talk, especially to pretty girls. I’ve always found it suspect that no one could read my mind.

So we’d sit on the bench after school, I’d quit basketball that year after realizing that the season was year round, unrelenting, and not particularly rewarding, when, at best, Icame off the bench and ran around like a chicken with its head cut off for a few minutes before a coach would pull me out of the game and ask why I hadn’t boxed out or taken a short jumper, and I’d have no answer because I didn’t play enough organized basketball to ever know why I was doing anything. I was just running around trying not to f-ck up. 

We unwrapped our sandwiches and sat at the bench, while I picked at my food, too nervous to really eat the food, which was problematic because a pair of hornets started menacing us, and we briefly swatted at them before eventually retreating and ceding the sandwiches to them. Year later, I’d have used the joke that I always do now, running away from the bee frantically and saying, “I’m sorry that I’m so scared. I’m actually allergic to bees,” which tends to make the other person excuse your prissiness and pushing them in the lower back towards said bees. And after a while, twenty minutes or so, I might let it slide that I’m not actually allergic to bees but that I really didn’t like getting stung by them because it hurts. I didn’t have it in me back then, and who knows what sort of unmanliness she perceived in my retreat from the sandwiches.