So, I’ve Been Thinking

photo by Slavcic

I was on a third date the other night, with a guy who was explaining how he’d fallen in love twice in his life but that he didn’t feel that way with me, when I thought of you.

I thought about that weeknight I first saw you across a dingy basement radio studio, mishearing your name through an accent as you introduced yourself and everyone laughed as my face went red trying to explain that I had spent my winter break in the same neighborhood where you grew up, remembering the musicals I saw and the gelato I ate and the feeling that I never wanted to leave, to which you politely smiled, a gesture that sent crinkles beside your grey-blue eyes and made me understand what it means to want to grow old with someone.

I thought about bumping into each other on the streets around campus on our way for tea or textbooks in a manner that felt more than coincidental to my (romance) narrative-driven brain, wanting to talk to you but feeling like I never had anything interesting enough to say, trying instead to think more about what a cock you were when you got drunk at the end of the year party and shouted in my ear and less about the blue velvet suit you changed into in the radio station’s office one Wednesday that left me so dizzy I had to sit down.

I thought about years passing: learning what made you happy (football matches and honeycomb chocolates and pub trivia) and what didn’t (greasy fast food and stupid questions and math), spending enough time together that I noticed you rubbed the mole on the back of your hand or flicked your large ears when nervous, having you over at my apartment on weekends to learn how to bake and hearing about all the girls you courted who studied business and spoke multiple languages at clubs I could never afford and wore lingerie that led you to ask them what felt good in bed, a question I have still yet to be asked by anyone, let alone anyone I like. 

I thought about the trip to the French Riviera, how you leaned over on the airplane to help me finish my word scramble, how you talked in your sleep and took twenty minutes to clear your throat in the morning and were never able to tie a bowtie nor carry a tune, how you told the waiter at the restaurant on the border in broken Italian our final night that I was ‘just your colleague,’ and I threw up in the bathroom then threw a fit in the Uber. 

I thought about the semester I worked sixteen-hour days as you studied abroad sixteen hours ahead and wrote me emails about how good it felt to find yourself, re-reading those messages at my underpaid internship, pricing flights that cost more than I’d ever see in a month before going home, finishing bottles of $8 wine, and sending you international mail instead. 

I thought about the year and a half that followed where I lived between your country and mine and got close to being alive for the first time, where I spent long weekends with your parents and sometimes your sister eating vegan food and listening to classical music and watching your father fall asleep to A Space Odyssey with a snore I realized you’d inherited, where I felt like I’d found home in a way I’ve terrifyingly never felt in my own—with my own family—and that I sometimes worry, when I’m the kind of emotional drunk, that I might never find it again.

I thought about the many opportunities I’ve had to tell you about this: the picnic in Sheep’s Meadow where you talked about another female friend who’d had the guts to ask, Why not me?; over 2AM tea at your parents’ kitchen table after Oktoberfest with your friends who asked me what passports I had when you told me you needed to get drunk to have these conversations and I felt anticipation scratching at the back of my throat; the evening following the France fight, the drinks at La Californie where I chugged a cocktail in a golden pineapple tumbler and you directly asked if that was why I was acting weird, but all I did was smirk, roll my eyes, and say, ‘I mean, maybe for a minute a long time ago, but no, no way. Never.’

I thought about how just that morning I had decided to take all of the things that reminded me of you in my apartment and put them in a Paul Smith shirt box in the closet in case this other guy came up because I could imagine bringing someone to bed but I couldn’t think of doing it with a trace of you there even though that’s almost as ridiculous as anticipating the awkward moment before falling asleep with him where I’d accidentally mutter your name, but I did… I did.

I thought about what might have happened if the last time I saw you I glanced up from my overpriced avocado hummus toast and finally said something, if I would’ve ended up on this date at all or if at least it might have gone a little better.

Eventually then, I looked into this other guy’s big, blurry blue eyes blinking at me behind his glasses, and I said, ‘I’ve only been in love once,’ my gaze darting to the grim, grey sidewalk before adding, ‘Well, at least, I think.’