In November, I woke from a dream. Funny. Despite the fogginess of those summer days, I can remember that dream quite clearly. I was in a gathering hall, maybe a lunch room. Above all of us it was fairly dark, but we seemed lit by candles and local lamps. By "us," I mean everyone from that summer. They were all there. If I had kept looking, maybe I'd find everyone else I'd met--the room seemed large enough for it--but everyone around me was from that summer. I searched around until I found L_____. She was holding a cup of something, as if this were some cocktail party, and smiled as I approached. The conversation is lost, as distinct words in dreams often are, but I remember saying something like:
"It is so good to see you. I never really got a chance to tell you that I really appreciated our time together. It meant a lot to me and I really loved getting to know you. I wish we would have had more time together."
We fell into a concise but front conversation. I woke after that and wrote it all down--which I'm sure is still tucked in my closet at my mother's house--before falling back to dreamless sleep. I missed L____. Tremendously. I had this moment with her, this moment of honesty and of clarity. Despite never coming forward with my feelings for L____, that time still feels... intimate, I guess. Another word may fit better, but it escapes me. We were un-pretentious and unguarded around one another. That sort of thing may be easy for many people at that age, but it stands out. No matter what followed--months, years down the road--I will always appreciate that time with L____. I don't appreciate it for what it became (which I'll get to), but for what it was. Those quiet card games and walks, that last night being close to her, it defined a real innocence (despite adolescence) of what I should expect or desire in a partner, whether that partner might be a friend or something more.
In the morning that followed--it must have been a Saturday because I remember writing it immediately--I wrote L____ a letter. I hope she still has it, tucked away in a shoebox, forgotten in a closet or basement. I don't care if she ever reads it again, I just want it to exist. I wrote to her about the dream and, without assumptions, that I would like to talk to her, write to her, hear from her. In whatever words I used in that letter, I was asking her to be in my life.
When I came back from that summer studies program, K_____ and I met and talked things out. I had a profound patience with the process. During the summer I had written to her with a crayon drawing of us holding hands. It was the sort of childlike cuteness I thought she'd appreciate. When she called after receiving the letter she was utterly surprised and distant. Somehow we had managed to totally miss each other in how we were relating to one another. While I had assumed we would "figure things out" after the summer, but were more or less still seeing each other, she understood that we were separate and it was inappropriate for me to send her letters (we must have been writing to each other weekly) in which two waxy depictions showed us holding hands.
I would later write to K_____ in a sealed letter that managed to be interpretted in the worst possible way. At the time I had gone from being sadly broken up with someone I'd "invested" in, to mellowly seeing someone I appreciated and continued to speak with, to falling into a very unnerving gray area of neither having been with nor separate from that person. I fell into a funk and could not make sense of what had happened. I had suggested "figuring out later" the relationship because K_____ was having such a difficult time; I thought it would be stabilizing. Afterward, I felt incredibly unbalanced and unable to make sense of it. I had wanted to be supportive, unassuming, caring; I felt that I'd been mislead, betrayed, and confounded.
When I wrote to L____ it felt like the first certain romantic thing I'd done in months. When I heard back from her, I was thrilled. Later, I learned that she and her boyfriend--the one from that summer--had just broken up. It all seemed remarkable, harmonious even how I had broached something that we recognized as mutual and had even dreamed of her the night that she most needed somone to reach out to her. (At least, that is how the whole thing felt as a late teenager in the first throes of a more adult affection.) So many pieces clicked together that the correspondence that followed assumed a bewildering fortitude.
We wrote to each other regularly for months. Maybe every other week we would talk on the phone. We sent packages to each other--I had small Japanese gummy candies for years afterward--and became close. I think it was January when I asked if she might want to consider what was happening a relationship. It was a fumbling phone conversation with a hefty, cordless landline phone; I was constantly afraid thay my mother my pick up the phone while we spoke. I fumbled through the words, not exactly mumbling but apologizing with every word for what might have unraveled our friendship.
"You know, if it's okay with you, I thought we might consider this--I mean, you and me--seeing each other."
Not exactly those words, but about as drawn out. She answered yes, that that sounded just great to her. All my friends knew that there was this beautiful young woman, half the country away, with whom I was quite taken. (The year before I had been speaking with J____ and had fallen into a similar, if slightly more overblown mode. I wonder if they expected it by now.) Did she tell her friends? My mother, who has always been fairly conservative in her readings of my romances, had commented on phone bills and my absences. At that moment, though, at the affirmation that my feelings were echoing back to me, I was happy. I was certain that whatever was happening as concrete and present in a way that I hadn't really known before.
For Valentine's Day that year, I bought a dozen white roses. White seemed best for L____. They were austere and classy, something I picked up from the grocery store as if I could actually hand them off to my sweetheart. The only other time I have ever bought roses was in middle school when I quietly handed one to the cute girl in school; it had added to the dozen or so she already had. Now I had someone who I wanted to give a whole dozen to. Hell, I would have bought six dozen, twelve. But I bought the one dozen from the grocery store where I'd had my first job and took a picture of them in the car the night before. I sent the picture to L____, adding that I would have handed them to her had I the chance. Instead, I took them to school the next day and handed one to each of my female friends who wasn't, to my knowledge, seeing someone.
And that was how I felt about my love for L____: Whatever I gave to her I had that much more to give to everyone else in my life. With L____ with me, even divided by a thousand miles, I could give more of myself and be certain I would still have enough for me. And enough for her.
Near the end of the school year I was getting more anxious. I wanted to touch and hold someone. I wanted someone I could think of as mine, someone who wanted to think of me as hers. I was envious of A_____ who had started dating K______, a sharp and befuddling young woman with a strong Germanic jawline and keen eyes. I spoke with M____ who had dated A______ after I started seeing K_____ and had been dismayed because of my choice. A__ may have been in the picture still, who provided some of the same allure of distance by living in Omaha an hour away while being just as striking if less well-focused in her passions. Meanwhile, other friends were off enjoying more explicit delights than have ever been my preference.
Summer came and we wanted to make a visit, a week and then a weekend that we might see each other, go exploring, find nooks to sneak kisses, to watch old movies with my arm around her. I must have dreamed about that trip that never was every night. I wanted her and I missed her and I could not make sense of why it wasn't clicking like it had with that first letter, with those card games. She had always moved so effortlessly on the quad, but each moment took on new weight.
We were both prepared to say it was over at the end of the summer. We were off to different colleges, no closer than before, and it just made sense. We didn't want to "hold each other back." So we didn't. We said goodbye, keep in touch, and good luck.
I must have entered college with a similar lightness to when I'd gone to Duke for the summer studies program. I wanted to know everyone, I could talk to anyone, I was unencumbered in a way I hadn't been for months. As I mentioned, A____ and I fumbled into our relationship. Shortly after that started, L____ sent me a letter. Maybe I had sent the last one and this was a response. We had written to each other so much that it had become ritual. She was seeing someone, too.
Later, we never talked about that correspondence, but I had gone out to the Arboretum and cried. It was a cool fall day in Minnesota, I think there was a light rain that day. I checked in with a half dozen new friends for comfort, but they all had there own crises. It was freshman year and we were all in our own heads, trying to figure out our own hearts. It makes sense now, but that night I thought that all I needed was one good friend and got nothing; and L____, the stalwart in my life for the entire year before, had slipped through my fingers.
The winter of my summer year I visited my friend S____ in Chicago. We went to high school together and I was thrilled to see my fellow lexophile again. On the "L" I reflected on that summer and my interest in counseling at the camp where I was once a student. By the time the semester started again in February (following a January term), I had applied for the position at Duke University West Campus.
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