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.
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