Michael (tentative)

This draft will probably be a little more than rough, but even the most polished and perfect prose wouldn’t be good enough for you.

You’ll have a story about you yet. You will. And once it’s finished, maybe one morning when I’ve spent the night and when you leave for work, I’ll place it on your pillow for you to read the same way you’ve left notes for me on the nightstand under my phone for me to wake up to once you’ve left.

I have trouble pin-pointing exactly why I’m so enamored of you. It could be the confliction I feel because of your lack of ambition, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A man without overzealous ambition lives simply, and simply enjoys living every day. And I believe in that simple life, not overcomplicated with anxieties and hopes for the future. I want to believe in that relaxed living so much, because I live in a world of anxieties. I’d be willing to try taking a different attitude towards life, other than the one I have.

Where and how you live leads me to believe in such a beautiful simplicity, in a little lofty cottage poking out of the ground, surrounded by woods, the boundaries of a horse farm, and hills fielded with bright buttercups that remind me of the opening credits to Little House on the Prairie. Your house is also bordered by the Brandywine river on which we capriciously went tubing last Sunday on a stiflingly humid 85 degree day in May. Your roommate and grade-school friend, Paul, and a few of your friends all piled into your car with our blown up (mistakenly so, as it was hard to fit them all in the car with us) $4 intertubes resembling tires from Wal-mart. You sped down dirt and gravel roads, the greenery whipping past us, your friend Alex leaning out of the frame, sitting inthe negative space of the window. The aroma of Yuengling lager from our open bottles and sounds of Creedance Clearwater Revival permeated the air. And I felt as though I were in the 60’s, a time I know you appreciate as much as I do, all denim and American life. Getting smoked out and not worried about a goddamn thing.

Your drinking habits are questionable like Kerouac’s. You enjoy lazy afternoons and sometimes I watch you shoot .22’s off of your back porch down the hill at some blue canister hanging from the tree line. I don’t like the loud noise of the gun, but at least I’m not surprised by it. If I know it’s coming, it isn’t as startling. I enjoy you enjoying lazy afternoons, and make myself lazy for you. It feels good to be relieved of all that ambition a few days out of the week, to forget that I’m too hard on myself when there’s no good reason for it.

You’re a question mark. You tell me nothing of how you feel for me, and when I doubt whether you want to be with me as much as I want to be with you, you tell me: “You don’t know what I want, Erin.” And that drives me crazy, because you leave it at that, and I’m still left wondering. It makes me think that you’re holding out on some master plan, though I know you don’t think that far ahead into the future, so I guess you’re just hinging on the ‘now,’ on the amorphous nature of this type of thing, of just letting things play out as they will. I believe that in not giving me an answer to your question mark, that you’re possibly saving this from an end. Because an answer would materialize this relationship, and these things, once defined, end sooner or later.

I almost asked you last night after we made love, with your body still between my legs and resting your messy head at my heart: “What do you feel when you’re with me?” But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Half because I was afraid of the answer ruining the night, and half afraid that I was once again begging for definition. The intimacy between you and I is something to be recognized. I don’t care what we do all day when we hang out, and it seems like we’re struggling for things to say, but once we get to bed all those other things are peripheral. Communication between us is a mystery in every way but that. Our bodies speak in movements that play to certain disabilities, like Braille for the blind, and effectively we understand each other. At least I feel it. You still don’t let me know, but I doubt less and less the more we sweat and sigh. Your care with me is the proof. A hand behind my head, a tight embrace that keeps me near to you, the firmness with which your hands move me, the punctuation of your moans. It’s the passion with which you keep me satisfied, pressing your mouth and tongue to all the places on me you adore. At least I hope it’s adoration. And genuine affection. Once again, I never know. You never tell me. Not with words, anyway.

I might’ve made this all up in my own head. Once again, I never know. This might not be real. You’d never tell me.

***

A couple of Saturdays later, you threw a party. I pulled up to see two girls in party dresses coming from your front door, to what I’m assuming was their car. Seeing them walk from your house like that made me feel strange, as if they were taking the ‘walk of shame’ the morning after. We passed each other, at an enormous distance. I walked through the grass as the automatic flood light kicked on, and down the brick walkway to your front door. I let myself in, at this point I was comfortable enough to be beyond

knocking. I walked into a bunch of boys lounging on the couch and around your little living room, only two of which I knew, Alex, and your brother. Out on the deck you had a beer pong table set up, red party cups on a white fold-out plastic table, with the height of the deck so unfortunate that if a ball rolled off of it, it required a good seven foot jump down to retrieve.

Your ex-girlfriend and an acquaintance of mine from high school called you for directions to your hidden little house. You didn’t warn me that she’d be coming. You hadn’t thought about it. Immediately my mind frenzied and my heart dropped. I feel so very attached to you, and it disheartens me to think that any wedge is between us, and I already know you seem to require more space than most, so there’s already an understood emotional separation between us. This is the one girl you admittedly cared the most about, and that same attention and care is something that I’m struggling to eek out of you. I was smoldering on the inside, so much so that despite my admitted inability to make friends with girls, I befriended one of the girls I’d seen visiting the car earlier, just so I could talk a little trash about your carelessness to make myself feel better. I felt intimidated. I was reduced to cattiness. I know I have no hold on you.

She showed up, and with a boyfriend. That was the one thing I felt might ameliorate the situation, if only in the slightest. If she had shown up with a girlfriend, newly out of the closet, hell, that probably would have made me feel even better. She came in from the deck with a plate of brownies and I thought to myself: I didn’t bring anything special to this party. I bet she made a better impression on everyone else than I had. I hadn’t made you baked goods yet. It was the first thing my friend Hilary had told me to do for you to let you know I liked you, and hadn’t done it yet. Shit, she beat me to it.

My brain reeled on with so many scenarios of what I could do better, or what I needed to do to get your attention. As she came in with the plate, her eyes met mine and I loosened the tension in my facial muscles enough to let out a chipper “Hi!” from the couch. I feign being okay so well. I quickly went back to stewing and let out a few bitter remarks to the hairdresser girl sitting next to me. That ’hi’ is all we’d exchanged with each other the entire night. I didn’t eat any of her fucking brownies, strictly out of protest.

Her boyfriend meandered around a little bit, looking quite out of place. And as she wasn’t tethered to his hip or anything, she naturally found herself mingling with others she’d known before I had. You guys started talking. You smiled and laughed and carried on like old friends, reacquainted. She was familiar with you in the way that I wanted to be. I didn’t make myself too present. I tried hard not to bother you, not to make any kind of scene, save the brushing of my fingertips at your hip in front of her as I passed through the kitchen to get myself another drink. Trust me, at this point if I didn’t have a drink in my hand, I was on my way for another one. The hours reeled on: Jeffrey. Pomegranate juice cocktail. Tequila. Drinkin outta cups like bitches! Bob Marley. Kevin. Mushrooms. Bowls. Glass. Metal. Who’s got a light? Grilling. Hot dogs. Hamburgers. Messy ketchup cap. Shitty beer in a cooler. Better beer in the fridge. She left.

I didn’t notice when she’d said goodbye, but after she’d left and by nearly the end of the night, you were closer to me. You actually put your arm around my waist. You apologized for being such a rotten boy to me. I must’ve pointed some questions toward you regarding once again our lack of definition and my complete and utter ignorance when it came to how you felt about me, because you turned me to face you, and said something to the effect of: “This really is all you’re waiting for?” I looked you dead in the eye and nodded enthusiastically, anticipating a response. Oh, please just say something. You didn’t. You just hinted that I’d have to wait. That it would come out, just not tonight. I’m not a patient person by any means, but goddammit, I will wait.

Around 3 a.m. we went to bed, and your leftover friends lay strewn about your living room in various stages of passing out.

The next day I felt lazy, and lounged around most of the morning in your bed in a tee shirt and short 80’s style track shorts (my pajama attire, the only other clothes I had with me since you’d spilled a glass of water on your floor--where my clothes from yesterday were). By noon you were already drunk on Jameson, Jim Beam, and shitty Natty Ice, still chilled and leftover from last night. Questionable drinking habits-- like Kerouac--I’ll say it again. I didn’t think again about last night’s cliffhanger, the day was proceeding typically, like any lazy Sunday after a late night Saturday. You turned the corner from the kitchen to the little nook that is “your room” to find me curled up in your blue cotton sheets. You stood there for a second. “You know, I like you more than I let on.” came out of your mouth. So abrupt. So unexpected. So perfect. You took a sip from your whiskey on the rocks, turned, and walked back through the kitchen to resume your mingling with last night’s leftover friends who were still hanging around. TRUIMPH! I wanted to squeal. I held it together but felt much brighter behind the eyes. 

***

You might be here to teach me patience, I think. To show me that not everyone works the way that I do. That there are ways to just loosen up and stop worrying. To take it slowly and feel it for real. Though I’m afraid. I’m afraid that you might just be using your explanation of slow relationship development as a front because you don’t feel the way I feel about you. That it isn’t as intense for you. Speaking from experience, I know those things don’t typically just develop over time if it wasn‘t there in the first place. Part of me is skeptical. You could just be dragging me along, afraid to admit you don’t feel the same way. But I think I’ll trust you . Why? I don’t know. My hope is so infinite, even in the most hopeless of situations.

One of your friends even let me know how hopeless my relationship with you is-- he saw the way I looked at you at the party and the way I took your hands when I visited you guys at work. He felt the need to warn me that you’re a charmer and can easily get me to do what you want (which is true), but that there’s no charming a charmer. No matter how much I do for you, I can’t win. I was playing a losing game from the start. The sad thing is, is that I think I’ve been aware of that the whole time.

But there’s something inside me that leads me to think that if I just wait it out, something inside you will click, and some sort of epiphany will ensue. There are things you’ve said to me, mixed as your signals are, that lead me to believe that. As sparse as our serious conversation is, when it happens, I feel so much closer to you. Even though you gloss over all the details, like that of your relationship (or lack thereof) with your father or why there’s such a disparity between you and your degenerate brother, or anything of consequence of your family history; I’ll take what I can get. I want to know so much about you and where you came from, but you play dumb, like you have a fine life, like nothing has ever really affected you. This attitude of yours worries, yet intrigues me. I attribute your drinking tendencies to these things you won’t talk about. Though I don’t know. You’d never tell me.

To be so oblivious to my feelings (like being unaware that I might want a caring visitor when I came down with a kidney infection that left me feverish and absent from work for a few days), you are surprisingly intuitive at the most random times. You called me out on certain things a couple of days ago when we last talked. That my sad stories of past disappointment are a device for pity. You’re half right. The realization of my divisive behavior hit me hard in the gut, but I realize also that I just want someone to understand me. You realized I haven’t many friends. You realized how lonely I am. It sounds pathetic. I sound desperate, but let me explain.

It’s not a kind of desperation where I need just anyone. It’s a sadness in knowing that feeling what I feel for you is so uncommon that I know it’ll be a challenge to find someone whose presence immediately stops me where I stand again. It’s a quiet loneliness that I have inside myself, a longing for empathy, a longing for you know me, to love me for where I’ve been, who I am, and who I’ll be, a longing to be understood on a deeper human level. It’s a longing for a true best friend. When I make long lasting bonds, they’re perfect, but true relationships like that are the most endangered of things. It’s something I can’t explain better than that.

I also realize I have an unfortunate fascination with being an underdog, being the exception to the rule and beating horrible odds; however, the odds are usually 99.9 per cent out of my favor and I’m left still stupidly struggling against them. I’ll keep pretending that anything is possible, even when I’m shown proof to the contrary. I’m a generally smart person in every way--but this. I’m clinging tightly to absolutely nothing, but this hope is nothing I can rationally explain, nothing that’s cerebral. My love for you is something visceral that has materialized and has dissipated into something haunting, an apparition of what I thought I saw, a quickly dissolving moment in time. It’s something that seemed real in my periphery, but with a closer look I realize nothing’s there. If you ever made yourself present again, I’d hope to see it dead on, real and standing in front of me.

***

You know I’m leaving soon for graduate school. That in a few short months I’ll be heading out on that train to California. I’m not holding my breath. I’m not expecting that much progress from you. Despite whatever ebb and flow of our closeness and distance, I still care. I still feel what I feel, but you’ve a lot to learn about consideration--a lot to learn about me. But know that even with the lack of progress, come the day I leave, it’ll only be right to tell you I love you, only because I’ve felt it all along. And you can leave it at that because I won’t expect you to say something you don’t mean. And, in my own way, I’ll take you with me. You’ll stay with me even if you aren’t. And I expect that you can either reassure me, or just let me get the hell out of this town. Either I’ll leave with your love, or I’ll just leave and start over.

I hope this is real, and I hope you’d finally tell me.

***

That was the faux ending. The ending I had hoped for. I really did make it all up in my head. “We’re friends who occasionally hook up.”

You finally told me.