Bygones

In my sophomore year of college, I worked a night job watching the front desk in my dorm. It was what all the cool kids were doing my freshman year, and I very much wanted to be cool. This came at such cost as working eleven until six in the morning and then trying to stay awake during Ancient History at eight-thirty. Then again, there was Ross. We had become friends the semester before as he tried to counsel me out of the fairly damaging relationship I was in at the time. We would discuss the evils of this boyfriend over shotglasses of coke and cold pizza and then I would blithely return to the boyfriend and ignore Ross until the next venting situation. It was quite possibly the healthiest friendship I had during college.

Counter to all reason, we took up the habit of staying up with each other on both of our shifts (even though previously mentioned boyfriend was very much ex-boyfriend and not cause for fervent conversation). At first, we bantered in our sophomoric prime, passing the night hours with tritisms and witty reparte. But we had history and...we were both single. Ross, I remember, had been single for quite some time. I had accused him over the summer as we e-mailed back and forth of him trying to begin something with me. And how dare he, me so freshly out of my first traumatic dating relationship? How could he possibly think I was ready?? Then I started giving him back massages during our shifts. The delights of him shivering and shimmying under my fingers as I feathered his neck and creeped my probing around his sensitive ribs. We brought gifts of caffeine and reading material to each other and the conversation became slightly more serious while remaining awkwardly distant. Occasionally I tried to force him to put a name to the laying on each other's laps and taking long walks even after the interminable night hours. Whenever I approached the topic, however, he became taciturn and would cut me off for hours or days. Still, the walks became more frequent and the cuddling in far away parks in the predawn of our lives that semester. And the friction of forced emotional distance chafed more and more.

We had made plans for him to visit my home over New Year's, but when we left school for break, we barely even had a comfort level for civil conversation. But he came anyway, and we went to the Grand Canyon with my brother and a couple friends. New Year's Eve, the tension reached a climax as we talked alone in the tent. He said he wanted his body closer to me and could not figure out why, and I stifled the urge to raise up and slap his stupid red face. Was I such a bad person to be attracted to? Had I been so utterly tainted by the clutching paws of my previous boyfriend that Ross could not justify touching the same flesh? Then we were back at school, and the relationship was entirely over. I had quit the deskjob, having developed mono from the extreme lack of sleep, and I did not share his shift with him anymore. Two months later, we had dinner together over which he told me he had decided to marry a girl the year below us. I smiled and choked down my food, and we made plans to meet again for another horrid farce of friendliness.

We only continued these wretched social events that spring, and I did not see him again regularly until I shared an apartment with his fiancee in one of the most ill-advised and ill-fated twists of irony I have experienced to this day. The friends of mine from freshman year, whom I had been hoping to live with since meeting them, knew her and wanted her as our necessary fourth. Pride could not allow me to admit the vileness of this idea, and so I smiled Christianly and said, "of course!" All I will say about that year in passing is that the horror of it put two of us in the hospital (and not the sew-you-up-make-you-better ward either) and a third one of us that probably should have been admitted as well. Ross was a mere pimple on the cancerous growth of that year. And that is what I am left with. A friendship of impotency and vagueries that leaves me even now in bafflement. So little said yet hinted at and expressed in every way except words. Ended so violently yet never even properly begun.