(when something stirs in the dark)

Being back on a college campus these days and having a few seniors in my classes, my brain keeps drifting back to my own senior year. When I think about this exact time ten years ago, I can't remember exactly which classes I was taking or what job I had then, but I know what I was doing with a lot of my free time: I was quite surely falling in love. The story is long and its ending sad, with my love becoming unrequited; but I didn't know at the start (or even in the middle) that that's what I was heading toward; I didn't know anything but that there was this guy I was getting to know and with each inch we moved closer to each other, such a bond was forming that it would take years for me to be able to let go.

The first time I ever saw him, I had my faced stuffed into a lilac bush; I was smiling and breathing in the magnificent odor of the petals and he was passing through the courtyard around which it turned out we both lived. When he saw me, he grinned with a look like appreciation, and I remembered that when, a month or two later, we crossed paths again. This time it was in the stairwell; he was heading out and I was going to watch a movie with a friend who turned out to be his roommate, though I didn't find that out until halfway through the film. At that point he snuck through the dark room to the shower after a workout at the gym. As he finished in the bathroom, he must've heard a scene he liked in the movie, because he came out to watch in his towel, and no one who was there will ever let me forget that my mouth truly did drop open at the sight of his obscenely cut and dripping wet torso. That night I finally thought to ask his name.

A few months later, I had my first conversation with him, sitting in his bedroom and talking for what later seemed like an appalling amount of time for a guy who could happily be silent for days on end. I can't tell you what we talked about, but I remember something that went loudly through my head as I walked back home. I could fall in love with this guy, I had said to myself, and very soon I did.

It's hard, sometimes, to remember how perfectly our friendship unfolded. How it started with him coming over to hang seven or eight strands of Christmas lights around my common room and staying late into the night; how it continued with little things like him asking me to read poetry to him as he lay in bed and tried to get to sleep. He knew I liked poetry, so he had me sit on the edge of his bed and read—one, maybe two poems at a time. Sometimes before leaving I would kiss him on the forehead, just like at times he would lean down and do to me when we were standing somewhere saying goodbye. But that was early on, and everything was still unspoken, so sometimes I just read to him and said good night. On those nights it probably took a long time to reach sleep myself. There was a poem I so wanted to read to him, but I couldn't; things were still unspoken, and I couldn't even let a Rilke poem say to him what I had on my mind:

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
to sit beside someone and be there.
I would like to rock you and sing softly
and go with you to and from sleep.
I would like to be the one in the house
who knew: The night was cold.
And I would like to listen in and listen out
into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,
and one sees to the bottom of time.
And down below one last, strange man walks by
and rouses a strange dog.
And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;
and they hold you gently and let you go
when something stirs in the dark.

One night he took me walking, aimlessly, I thought; but it got dark out, and we had gone quite a ways, so I finally asked where we were headed. We were by the river when he told me; there were tall grasses beside us, and I knew we were almost to the next town. On a walking tour of my childhood, he told me as we reached his favorite basketball court, and then he described how all the boys he grew up with first tasted alcohol sitting out on the court. He laughed as he thought back on that; he smiled as he sat me in the hammock behind his parents' house and swung me; he grew quiet as we lay down on the grass of the golf course beyond their home and stared at the sky. We lay there a long time before he told me that I was stretched out on his favorite patch of grass on this earth, that I was taking in his favorite view of the stars in the sky.

A long time after I let him go, I told myself it was OK to hold on to one or two of the best memories, it was OK to hold on at least to that memory—because it's not so often in life that someone fully lays himself open to you and asks you to walk on in. I don't think back on it often anymore; I kicked him out of my life five years ago, almost exactly five years after we started growing so close without putting the right words to things before it was too late. He wasn't available, emotionally, when I met him; and by the time he finally was, I had gotten over him. We had a bond like family by then, but he hadn't been able to go where I wanted us to go and so I'd gotten over him. But we held on to each other like family; we spent time together like family. Eventually it was just too much; we were too bonded for people who weren't in a relationship; my heart was still tied up in him and it hindered me from dating, and his eventual girlfriend seemed to think the same thing for him.

One weekend after five years of all this, we went to stay at his parents' ski condo and had a great time. I skied my intermediate slopes and he hit the big ones; afterward we sat in his favorite cafe and I drank hot cocoa and read poetry while he did his homework for an engineering class he was in. Sometime in the middle of that quiet afternoon by a snow-filled window, I told him my dream of owning a bookstore with a cafe in it—a cafe just like this one. The other memory I may never let go of is the way he looked at me in that moment; me, sitting in this place that he had loved since childhood; me, sharing a dream with him; me, there, with him after all those years; and he told me that he could build it for me, the bookstore with the cafe in it just like this one; once he (started and) finished architecture school, he could build it. In the meantime, a few weeks later, he gave me as a birthday present a book about the business of opening a cafe, and he told me he thought I really should do it; he really wanted me to do it.

In that moment between my dream and his affirmation of it, I knew that I was still in love with him. It took six more months for me to tell him so—for me to tell him so and ask him to step out of my life in the very same breath. But I knew it in that moment, that I loved him and he loved me but it was never going to be in the way that I hoped. He had a girlfriend then, when he looked at me and told me he could build my dream into reality, and perhaps that's what made it possible for me to finally see that whatever he and I were just was not right.

That all comes into my mind when I'm on campus and thinking back on college, but it's really at the forefront because of something that happened a month ago when I was back in Cambridge, where all this unfolded. I was there just two days, going to a wedding, and as I got on the red line to leave town, I thought I saw him. If it had been him, he'd be an architect now, fully licensed and practicing. If it had been him, he'd be a husband and a father; he might have had his baby in his arms. When the man's face rose I knew it wasn't who I'd thought it was, but in those few seconds afterward, I considered what I would have done if he had been there, just a few people down from me on the train. Five years had passed since I'd seen him; I would have smiled with all my heart. Five years had passed; I would have smiled and stepped off the train.