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I just finished answering an email from the only person I�ve given this URL to. Brian wrote to tell me "Yeah so I just read more journal entries and it's like Damn I have no idea about your life whatsoever in these past 5ish years." I�m not sure how I feel about that statement. As I told him, part of why I gave him the address was so he could read what I�d written and fill in some of those gaps. I have this need, I guess, to fortify that friendship, to find a way to make it stronger than it is now. I can�t have him relive those missing years with me, but I can tell him about them. Or, more to the point, I can write about them and have him read them. I don�t know if he�ll come back here and read this, but I�m thinking about him today, and therefore writing about him. I hope you aren�t embarrassed, Brian, that you�re my topic for the moment. Perhaps you�ll learn something else, something I�ve never quite told you in the time we HAVE spent together.
Brian holds a very special place in my life history in that he�s the first head-over-heels love of my life. Scott and I broke up because I met him, and only got back together later because there was no more Brian in my life. He and I met through a mutual friend. I was working part-time at an ice cream store. Keith and Brian came to visit me the week before Valentine�s Day. It was mid-winter cold out, but Brian was wearing just a Nike T-shirt. He had shoulder-length brown hair that turned into one big curl when he pulled it back, which was almost always. His hair, truthfully, was the first thing I noticed about him. In fact, the first words I spoke to him were "Can I touch your hair?" He said yes. I was instantly smitten. He fit that "ideal boy" picture in my 21-year-old head. You know�the person who exists only in your imagination as what you want your next boyfriend (or girlfriend, I suppose, though I can only speak on the former) to be like? Brian was it. And I was overwhelmed.
I should also mention, I suppose, that when we met, he was 17, a high school junior. As I pointed out a little further up, I was 21. The first night I went out with him, we didn�t mention that at all. Who had time? I was busy telling him my life story, including all sorts of details I�d never shared with anyone. Being with Brian was an instantaneously comfortable spot. I didn�t stop to think about the potential negative side effects of my being four and a half years older than he was. I was way too busy falling in love.
I never had a fight with him. I only remember being angry with him once, because he was about three-and-a-half hours late to meet me at my house. For the most part, we just had a really good time together. Which was good, as the rest of my life was falling apart at the same time. My dad had moved to California and we were on shaky-at-best terms. My mom had moved her boyfriend into our house, and although he and I got along very well, his moving in was shifting the balance in our household. I was starting school again for the first time in several years. Life outside-of-Brian was weird. So I threw myself wholeheartedly into life-with-Brian.
One afternoon, I came out of my English class at Northeastern to find him standing at the foot of the stairs, holding one red rose and smiling at me. I still have the petals from that flower. It remains one of my nicest moments.
He and I were caught by the police in the Westwood High School parking lot one night. The whole humiliating "Is everything alright, miss?" flashlight in our eyes, cop trying not to laugh nine yards. I guess it serves us right for trying to have sex in a bright yellow Chevette. We laughed about it, though. We laughed a lot. Another afternoon, he and I were in my bedroom, taking advantage of the empty house. In the midst of a rather compromising moment, my phone rang. Brian picked it up and handed it to me. My friend Mark, worried by my out-of-breath hello, apologized for making me run to the phone. At least one of us laughed at that.
He went off to work at a YMCA camp for the summer after school ended. I think, by then, that I had overwhelmed him. He broke up with me several weeks before he left. I was devastated. Hadn�t let myself see it coming at all, although in hindsight, I know he tried to talk to me several times before that day. I remember being in his apartment listening both to him tell me he didn�t want to be my boyfriend any more, and to his neighbors fight horribly. They used to throw things, scream, really hurt each other. I think once she broke his wrist. I was listening to Brian, thinking, "It could be worse. That could be us."
I grieved over that for a long time. I remember being in his hometown one afternoon while he was at summer camp, eating pizza with a friend. I thought I saw Brian out the window of the restaurant, dropped my pizza, jumped from the table mid-sentence and ran out to the street. Almost got myself killed. Scared the shit out of my friend. I didn�t even think about it, though. My body just went. That� s how much I wanted to see him.
Every boy I dated after that got the comparison list. No one measured up. He�d left behind touch shoes to fill. My dad died several months later, and Scott and I got back together in the mess that followed the funeral, but it wasn�t the same. I never felt for him that all-consuming passion I felt for Brian. It wasn�t until I met the Artboy, three years later, that I stopped wanting that back.
Being with Brian opened the door for the next part of my life. I would never have fallen for the Artboy the way I did if I hadn�t fallen for Brian first. Which is still a good thing. I wouldn�t trade any of it. There�s too much good mixed in with the heartache.
Brian and I live on opposite sides of the country now. For whatever reason, we seem to do better on paper than we do face-to-face these days. I don�t know if the flesh-and-blood him is too much for me still? The first time I saw him after several years, he came to my house with his friend Sean and Sean�s girlfriend. Several shots of blackberry brandy later, I might have tried to kiss him, if only my bed hadn�t been spinning like that. He still made me feel the same way I did when he walked into my ice cream store job seven years earlier. Only I wasn�t 21 any more, and my life was a little more complex. A little piece of me will always regret that. Not because I think it would have changed where I am today, but because I'd never gotten entirely over that want, and now the chance is gone.
These days, though, I�m just glad to be talking to him. What I ended up with is a good friend. So I read his email and smile, and hope he�s okay, and enjoy the conversation process we have. And every once in a while, I come across those rose petals and smile a secret smile to myself, and remember.
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