TBT #16: Spoken Word

Look at us, draped in this obsessive need to define everything. What’s the nature of your relationship with the young lady? Is it friendship? Platonic? Love? What does she mean to you, exactly? Because, surely, words must be enough to describe it. It’s impossible that any sort of relationship could transcrend simple words, isn’t it? Relationships don’t get that complicated, do they?

These are The Best Things Ever for Friday, November 12, 2004.

Fourteen

Still reeling from too-long puberty, I’m a gangly mess seemingly decades away from calling himself a man. Taking too-long showers, wishing the door to my room would lock. Avoiding flourescant lights and casting only fleeting glances at mirrors, I’m formless, humourless, soulless. I’m a conversation escape artist, listening for ways out above all else. I fall in love with girls I see on the street, in the hallways, in my head. It’s lonely when it’s dark.

And there you are, the girl in art class with tangled hair and a crooked smile, with giant gaudy glasses and ill-fitting clothes. We walk home together, and I don’t know why. I stammer when I talk to you and I make bad jokes. And yet you still stay, and you still laugh. And, god, brush against me again. Just one more time.

We talk about my failed math tests and the way your parents won’t stop fighting. I mumble quiet responses and look straight ahead when you try to cry. In late April we sit on a hillside on a Sunday afternoon and make plans to go around the world. We watch children chase ducks across the grass and find pictures in the clouds and then the sunset. And you touch my hand and smile half-smiles and without a trace of desperation or doubt, you say that you love me. And all I can do is sigh.

Because I’m not sure I love you, but I’ll hold your hand like I do.

Seventeen

We find ourselves laughing at yearbook quotes and cheesy graduation songs. The highschool is a mess of nervous energy, of sad finality, of moving on. My parents lay college brochures on my bed and sent me on long internet searches to find a future. I want to leave, but I don’t want to go. I haven’t seen you much this year, with the way you’ve been working. Just quick glances when we pass in the hall and long unexpected phonecalls late Friday nights. We’re not going to be together after this year, as you’ll go one way and I’ll go another, and yet I don’t know how to show you how sad that makes me.

We never really dated. Dealing with a barrier of shyness and insecurity, I never made a move towards asking you out. But, you know, of course, how I feel. And I spend all of prom sitting with you. Laughing as the ‘cool kids’ sneak drinks and pretend like this just might be the most important night of their lives.

The house band plays bad pop music and they drop balloons from the ceiling. And by the end the dancefloor is covered with dropped corsages and scuff marks from heels. Couples make out in the corner in a funny display of warped romance and you lean your head against your shoulder. When it gets quiet, near the end, I tell you you look beautiful. And you do. You shine as you take my hand, and ask a question with a smile. And I grin and nod and everything, for that moment, seems okay.

I don’t know if I love you, but I’ll dance like I do.

Twenty-two

Look at me now, fifty thousand dollars later and still without a clue. I’m riding a tsumnai built on assorted half-knowledge of random philosophers and cliff-note novels. I can’t tell you exactly what I’ve learned, but apparently it will all be summed up with a piece of paper I’ll put on my wall. They’re asking me now what I’m going to do next, and I don’t know. To be a teacher, to do more school, to work in an office, to sell things to people — none of it interests me. I sit at my desk and try to picture myself in two years, and all I can think of is old mystery novels and my favourite restaurant as a kid.

I haven’t talked to you very much, since we parted. I see you in the summer, sometimes, but we’re both working and none of our plans come together as they should. I love the way we are when we’re together. I love the way you hug me, the way you smile, the stories you share with such enthusiasm. We see movies in town and spend hours afterwards, walking across the parking lot, trying not to leave.

You’re doing much better than I am, of course — like there was ever any doubt. You’ll go on to great things, like I always said you would. And yet still one night you cry on the phone, afraid for the future. Afraid for yourself. And I do like I did before, I mumble and tell you that it’ll be okay. But it’s not… — it’s not like when we were kids anymore. As you’re telling me how scared you are of everything, I repeat your name six times, and then choke, on the seventh.

I’m not sure that I love you, but I’ll cry like I do.

Thirty-one

I’m having one of those moments where I’m looking back at the past five years of my life and wondering who the hell was running things for those years. It’s too much time in a crappy bar. It’s a tiny apartment, a used car that breaks too much, a job I hate, a girl I don’t really know. It’s sitting at a desk all day counting and recounting the pens in the coffee cup. It’s sitting in a traffic jam and listening to the same six songs on the radio and then realizing, to my utter horror, that I know all the words. It’s getting a call from this girl I’m dating where she tells me she’s late. And me, not getting it, telling her that it’s okay, I haven’t started dinner yet.

It’s a crying baby and moving from a tiny apartment to a tiny house. It’s late mortage payments and having to ask the boss for a raise. It’s having no dreams because I never sleep. It’s getting married to a girl my parents hate. It’s later finding her in bed with another man. It’s broken glass and a hole in the drywall. It’s leaving, because there’s nothing else to do.

And here I am, on your doorstep. I haven’t seen you in five years. Haven’t talked to you in three. And I’m trying to think of something to say, as I stare at you. With your hair pulled back and contact lenses in, you look like an adult now. And I know, somehow, that you’ll take me into your house. And hold me and take care of me and tell me it’s okay.

And I don’t know if I love you, but I’ll kiss you like I do.

Fifty-nine

It’s too late now, I guess. I’m trying to figure out where the time went as I do all the things my father did. I mow the lawn, I clean the gutters, I spend two hours each night reading the newspaper from beginning to end. I lose my reading glasses on my forehead, and occasionally have trouble keeping the names of my three children straight. I go to bed at 10 and wake up at 6. It’s only very rarely that I regret anything.

You sleep beside me every night. Early in the morning, you run your hands across my back, waiting for me to wake up. And when I finally begin to stir, I roll over and you smile, and I smile. And then I grunt and tell you to go make me eggs. Because I’m really funny, like that.

I look at you now, gray hair and wrinkled face, and think back through all the years of my life. Some I spent with you, and some we spent apart. And for all of that, we stayed connected, somehow. I never seriously thought it would be you, in the end, but life took me here. And when I look at that smile — same as it always was — I can easily make peace with this, my life.

I’m not sure I love you, but I can live like I do.