random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

Monday, August 09, 2004

Correspondence Course

It�s a large plastic box with a green lid, not unlike the ones people use to store their Xmas decorations at the end of the season. My name is written on two sides in thick Sharpie marker block letters. The box has been sitting in my mom�s garage for three or four years, maybe more. And in all that time, I really haven�t had the urge to dig into it and �do something� with the contents.

Twelve cubic feet, 80% full of memories.

If you�ve been here a few times before, you probably know one thing about me that is an absolute truth. I live in the past. It�s really not the healthiest place to be, but here we are. That�s why I haven�t gotten into the box. I don�t dig in, because it pains me to remember some of the things that I really have tried to forget.

This weekend, however, I had to get it out of my mom�s garage and take it home. And under the auspices of lightening the load in the box, I went through it to clean it out.

Sure, there was stuff in the box that I was excited to find. I found my earliest stab at absurd humor in a first grade paper titled �My Life.� In it, I start off with truth, but then describe my family�s move into an old barn in a nearby town, and my dad�s career switch to become a lawyer, even naming a local insurance company outright as his place of employ. I invent a couple of sisters I don�t have, and I don�t think the teacher grading the paper had any idea this was almost entirely fictional.

I also found a third grade review of a board game that stated �Monkeys testing this game must have been asleep.�

I really do make myself laugh sometimes.

Cleaning out this box, though, I realized that I�ve kept every single note and letter I ever received from about 9th grade through my freshman year of college. And, since guys don�t really write each other letters very often, a good 95% of the content is from girls. And, although in every case there�s at least ten years gone, some of the wounds are real, and every opportunity I had at friendship or love with some of these girls is far more obvious to me now than it ever was then.

One night at the bar earlier this year, I was talking to Jeff, a friend of mine who graduated the year after I did from our high school. The topic of his recent ten year reunion came up, and I was asking him for updates on some people we both knew. On his own, he offered, �Who was the girl from my year, ridiculously smart, went through the U of M Med School on the fast track, and really got surprisingly hot all of a sudden?�

That was M. Hers was the hardest of the notes and letters to read.

I�ve actually been stuck here really thinking about what I want to say about Mel and myself. She was both a tremendous friend, as well as being one of the great disappointments of my life. M was one of those girls who was mentally capable of achieving anything she wanted. She was a beautiful girl who had a big enough brain and just enough mousiness to her that she wasn�t running with the popular kids.

And I dug her.

I always managed to fall in love with a girl�s mind and spirit far more than her beauty, but M was legit all the way across. I didn�t just have a crush on the girl, which I did, but I had a great deal of respect for her as well. At that point in my life, that made her unique.

And that made us friends. We were equals, or maybe she was even my better. She probably was. We were able to really talk, and really understand, and really sympathize with each other. Maybe that�s partly due to the pressure not being on us while we forged our friendship.

See, M had a boyfriend when we met. I was a senior, she was a junior, and I didn�t know much about this guy. Well, much more than that he was sullen, an underachiever, and not as intelligent as a girl like this deserved. He went to the local �alternative� high school.

I couldn�t figure it out. I think some of it was due to her own low self-image, and maybe part of it was channeling the model of her relationship with her father, himself an exceedingly quiet and sullen man (if memory serves). But here was a vibrant girl, when she wanted to be. Someone who could engender in you the feeling of confidence and pride, as when you conversed with this girl, the brightness in her eyes and her ability to dissect the method of your madness astounded you at every turn.

I remember plenty of conversations about the boyfriend, but I remember only once did I ever challenge her to prove that she wasn�t in a rut, being dragged down by this anchor in her life. We were on the beach, walking at sunset in August, and every ounce of my heart belonged to her. If she wanted it. And I still hadn�t figured that part of the equation out yet.

She never did come up with the reason that could possibly satisfy my question. �Why are you with this guy?� Which, of course, meant, �Why are you with this guy and not with me?� I wasn�t able to ask that question, to really tell her what I thought.

Which was fine, I went away to school, and she continued to date this guy. And she continued to write me letters.

And in the letters to her, I managed to find a way to tell her what I was feeling. And, maybe as a byproduct of that, she dumped him.

The letter I have of hers is the one immediately following the breakup. The one that tells me she wants to be with me, but her heart hurts and it may take some time. The one where she tells me that she digs me too, and respects me even more than I�ve told her I respect her. Where she talks about coming up to see me, and how she�s looking forward to seeing me when I can get home for a break soon.

This wouldn�t be a letter I sigh and frown when I read nowadays, if it weren�t for the fact that it only took a short time from that letter for her to give in to the boyfriend and bring him back, apologetically, into her life. If it wasn�t for my idiot mentality that told me that if she�s going to screw me over like that, then she wasn�t worth my friendship anymore. If it wasn�t for the feelings of regret I have now that she and I were quite possibly the most perfectly matched people at those individual points of our lives, and I never so much as got to kiss the girl.

My box was littered with these notes and letters. Friendships I wish I still had, girls both blowing me off and trying to bring me out of my shell. I can�t help but think about how screwed up my marriage became, and how all these forgotten friendships and missed opportunities, had I been able to realize their potential, may have spared me both the agony of my marriage, as well as this undying spectre of my past failures and mistakes that I seem never able to shake far from my thoughts.

But more than any of the others, it was M who brought me so close to maybe for once realizing a real relationship out of the friendships with those girls I pined for relentlessly. And to have the love of that girl so tantalizingly close, and then lose it. Well, that�s why I keep these letters, and that�s why I think about my hits and misses as often as I do.

I don�t want to miss another chance like this one again.

[>>]posted at 5:18 PM by BG - click to email
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