First: This is a very rough draft of the first two sections. I'm working on variety and quantity before I prune and revise. In some ways, this is the heart of what I'm working on. It also seems to be in the way of me doing anything else. The writing is loose and meandering and I am okay with that. It'll tighten up with revision, but I don't think I mind the overall flow.
As you may notice, I'm not sure how to refer to people respectfully. Though there are individuals I know wouldn't mind my reference to them, it seems in poor taste to include their names and not others. So far, there are several L_ named people. This is just my life, so don't get uppity if it's confusing. If anyone knows some conventions on respectful pseudonyms, let me know.
Lastly, I'm trying to frame a story I'm somewhat tired of telling without telling a tired story. Where I cut is probably 1/3 of the way through the whole piece. There will be two more sections on the primary story so that the structure will be A B B A B A, with A being more commentary/reflection and B being more narrative and focused on the primary arch. If I were to write this all as a story, I would dig out the journals and read them. I don't want to and don't have to. I'm the writer and this seems like the most appropriate way for me to handle this story at this time. I end this on a certain note with the expectation it will be easy to pick up again.
...
I still take in a healthy dose of romanticism now and then. As a teenager, every woman became more charming the further away she was. I dated lovely women with large personalities and quirks to stand out. I thought I could tell one or another that I loved her and, at the time, I think I was telling the truth. Love, I think, is at first a simple thing. As a child, love is what we give caring parents, what we have for our siblings on the better days, and what comes in cards from grandparents and aunts that keeps the check from falling out until you've properly read the card. And those things are love, or the signifiers of love, until it gets rolled up with other things.
L_____, L____, and I were walking by the athletic center one night. If memory serves, it would have been early or mid-spring of 2006. I had met the two of them in January and had latched onto them. It was my freshman year of college, a hard year for many, myself included. My college was one of those small liberal arts institutions scattered around the upper Midwest. Later I'd joke that I was no more than two steps removed from everyone and that if I were, I probably didn't want to know them anyway. I mean, who would be so interesting that didn't already know one of the interesting people I'd had in class or as a friend or seen perform?
We were talking about love. We were being direct and unassuming in a way that has gotten harder. I'm tempted to make something up, but in the end I can't really remember much of the conversation. It was a time in my life when I thought everything I had to say was important and only after the matter would try to write down anyone else's ideas. This, I have no doubt, is an entirely ficitonal monologue loosely "based on real events;" but here it goes:
"I wonder if love is something that gets heavier and heavier," I said, trying to make sense of the tumbling thoughts. "Early on, love is light, even weightless at times. When you're in love you feel like you're barely touching the ground. As you go along your love picks up things. There was that date and that heartbreak that stick to the outside. They get wrapped up by something else. Before you know it, you're carrying the weight of the world on you. Eventually, you need someone to help you carry it or you just can't imagine adding more weight. That's when you find someone.
"It isn't that you love that person more than anyone else. It is that you make yourself love that person differently. It comes from a certain perspectve you didn't have before"--and this is where I'm sure I'm making things up in an effort to condense the questions L_____ and L____ asked, the specifics of which I can't recall. "It sounds like you're surrending, that suddenly you can't help settling on this person. I think I know some people like that." And yes, I would have been so brazen to say something like that. "Or maybe you're suddenly ready, because of the weight, for something that you weren't ready for before."
I think that this is a really awful position. Just truly horrible. It valorizes the noncommital, the wavering, the "afraid of commitment" in an effort to explain away youthful anxiety about love. It was also coming at a transition point. Of course, college is the obvious one, but I would have recently ended with the elegance of a flatulent bison my first college relationship. A___ has since become one of my dearest and most valuable friends and I can validate my floundering, frustrating, and frankly unkind treatment of her as some necessary means to get to where we are now. Why she is not regularly angry at me I cannot say, unless it has to do with her northern Minnesota demeanor. Whatever it is, I am thankful for it.
A___ had caught me--because I pretty much thrust myself at her one night--in the wake of another relationship ending. Somehow, I have to begin that story. The story has been told so many time so as to be threadbare, its edges are frayed, and I know that memory is such a thing that whatever I tell now is quite different from anything that actually happened. I can even play indifferent about the story, that it was a moment (or two, really) in my life that has passed, almost forgotten. I've been storing it in drawers and closets, tucking it outside of the light, but everywhere I have gone I have packed into a box or chest or suitcase. I'm tired of moving it, hauling it around, tucking it away. I want to toss it out.
K_____ and I had one of those relationships that only makes sense in high school. I remember us splitting up before I left for a summer camp at Duke University in the summer of 2004. I had a cell phone that was supposed to be for calling home when I'd be out late and if I ever got into a car accident. It came with me to North Carolina and I was talking to K_____ more often than my parents. One night I told her, "Maybe we should just hold off on deciding if we're broken up or not." (Like I said, a strictly high school relationship.) I remember her agreeing. To me we were, if strangely, more or less together again. At the same time I knew that K_____ was dating someone else. Someone I'd met and found uninspired and cold. I didn't mind. At the end of the day K_____ would call me and we'd talk about the dozens of uninteresting things that had happened that day.
Not that my life was uneventful. I was away from home with dozens of other high school students. There was over a hundred of us, all of us quite proud of our wits and grades, interested in esoteric academia, readers of nonfiction for fun. I was introduced in the first critical way to philosophy and it has stolen my heart in ways that another person never can--though every new attempt thrills and entices me. My new friends were sharp and quirky and full of bite. I took a class titled the Anthropology of Violence in which I read so many books on people hurting others that I quit two-thirds of the way through from emotional exhaustion. As one might expect with a dormitory full of high schoolers, romance and intrigue were rampant.
A_____ and I disagreed on everything I could think up but her freckles and light orange (or was it strawberry blonde) hair were so endearing I thought I'd crumple. S____ was loud and curvacious and bounded with such seductive confidence that I thought her attention must electrify anyone it fell on. S____ and N___ quickly became my dear friends and stalwarts; only later did I find out that they played a game of tallying who of the two of them had received more of my attention that day and, therefore, I was actually "crushing on." Even M____ told me one night that he thought I'd be the nice boy to bring home to show his parents.
In the end, I felt "spoken for" by K_____. I'd grown up heavy and still feel that weight on me most days. It had slowed me down, encouraged me to read more than talk, taught me the blessings of a creative mind. In the fall or spring prior--the school year of 2003-2004--had I learned to be outgoing, engaging, even entertaining in groups. I maintained more skill in communicating one-on-one and that tendency ignited small sparks of interest. The notion that I might be charming, even alluring to young women embarrassed me. It also ennervated me. By being attentive but slightly disinterested, conversational but noncommittal, caring but not doting I was exploring an unusual, even (and I wouldn't learn the term for some time) queer space.
Years before I'd been queered by acquaintances and classmates. It happened regularly in college. I never learned to keep my hands by my sides when I spoke. My mother continues to be kind and caring, traits that I appreciate and share. Showing hospitality is both a basic demand of civility and very respectful to guests. Light touches mixed with an avoidance of competitive sport all placed me in the "confused" category. Though I wasn't always happy with my shape, my skills, or my looks, I was happy with who I was, my friends, and my pasttimes.
Maybe I balanced the outsideness with a skill for invisibility, but growing up where I did, how I did made me safe. I had a community of open-minded peers, educators who liked to challenge norms, and an incredibly caring and patient mother. What I mean is that in various small ways and by various people, I was identified as gay. Women I'm interested in have often commented they considerd I might be gay. I was never threatened and my anxieties arose from other things. The experience has given me some perspective without the burden of actually coming out, of being directly confronted by overt homophobia, or being interrogated by family and friends because of their prejudices.
So my junior year and again at the summer studies program, I was a pleasantly aloof, engaging, and gently affectionate young person. There are girls, now women, with whom I might have been close and think about from time to time. When K_____ and I started dating, it was to deny others I also cared about. It was much the same when K_____ and I "called off" the break up. That said, there is nothing like a dormitory of teenagers to inflame hearts.
This is where I met L____. I remember seeing her cross the quad in long, flowing skirts. I woke earlier than S____ and N___ or just about anyone else I knew. I'd read over a quiet breakfast and started returning to the dorms, to wake S____ and N___ with cups of coffee. They would both huddle in little forts under their beds talking with friends or tapping away on their computers. Both were (and I assume still are) small framed women; they'd wear each other's clothes as often as their own. So I'd knock on their unlocked door and let myself in with steaming cups of coffee. N___ once joked that I was Daddy Caleb, which in light of everything else is somewhat perplexing.
L____ and I crossed paths regularly before sharing words. We did not have class together and lived on different sides of the dormitory. Maybe she was taking an art history or a literature class. Years later she was interning at the art museum, but her interests have always been diverse. I have it all written down somewhere--I was fastidious about journaling then--but now I can only think of a handful of actual meetings.
We played cards in one of the common rooms. Rummy, I think, or maybe gin rummy. I remember trying not to stare at her. L____ is classically beautiful. It sounds trite now, and I've met other women who idolize or resemble Audrey Hepburn, but L____ had always made more sense as a movie star or foreign royalty than as someone I met in summer camp. I remember being taken aback that her mother was a botanist of a certain stripe; I was interested, but it seemed so... material compared to the airiness with which she walked, the gentleness with which she spoke, her delicately sharp bone structure.
Despite my friends' encouragement at the last dance of the camp, I could not ask her to join me. The formality of asking someone to dance still fills me with anxiety, I've just gotten better at overcoming it. We had gone on evening walks several times. Duke University has more than a few flaws, but its grounds are stunning. Dormitories and faculty halls are weighty with large red bricks and age. Malls of trimmed grass and the stubborn trails of packed earth stretch beneath generous, overhanging trees. Small gardens and leisurely boulevards provide innumerable landmarks for wanderers. The Sarah P. Duke Gardens are expansive and regal with plaques on plants and donors and a plaza dedicated to Thomas Jefferson (though I believe they were out of bounds for ust at that time). Whoever I found myself with, L____ included, we were never without topics related to class, friends, or our own dreams for ourselves. (I can remember one exception to this rule.) Most of us had been told in one way or another that we were brilliant young people, capable of anything, and we pretty much believed them.
Now that I say that, I think that L____ and I--with similar notions of romanticism--walked quietly in the evening. We did not hold hands--both of us had someone at home--and were not too nervous to talk. Nevertheless, we seemed in tune with those meditative moments. We took in the sights, each step, the company of the other like two people who had known each other long enough to not have to talk. With L____, I thought a whole day, a whole week might rise and set and we would have enjoyed each change. We were astronomers, fascinated with the gyrations of flowers and the patter of rainfall and the arteries of this place we shared for six weeks.
I found Laura after the dance. No one slept much the night before we were to depart. I think we sat close on a hard university sofa. I set my arm around her, I think. Whatever gesture it was, she enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. We might have played cards. I'm not sure on all the details. I know that I was happy and that we were together.
S____, or maybe A____ (though I think it was S____), and I shared a cab to the airport. We were quiet. Tired. Excited and sad and somehow dozens of other feelings crammed together. We were young and everything is dialed to eleven when you're seventeen years old. We had spiral bound term books with scattered black and white photos and spreadsheets of names, addresses, phone numbers. I remember writing to S____ and N___ a little, but mostly the book slid onto a shelf and was forgotten.
In November, I woke from a dream. Funny. Despite the fogginess of those summer days, I can remember that dream quite clearly.
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