autumn is my favorite season.
ironically, autumn has also been the saddest season in my life.
[i remember walking into my room --- well, i can hardly say it was "my" room since i shared it with two other people --- but my small lamp with the pink light bulb was on, giving the space an intense, surreal glow. i sank slowly onto the bottom bunk and felt utterly lost. i took my journal in my hands and wrote slowly about what had been, what could have been, and now, what was not.]
the window was open a crack and evening had fallen.
the air stirred my memory. i was overwhelmed.
[i walked into the room, his room, the room i'd wanted to be in all night but i'd been distracted. rather, i'd been so strongly focused on who was in that room that i'd purposely distracted myself. i always wanted what i couldn't have, and i was sick of that feeling. of that not-having.
there were other people there, too --- where did all the people come from? oh yes, they were my distractions, bodies i had employed to keep me from not having what i truly wanted. suddenly i felt cruel and irrational. they had no idea. but now i wanted them gone, and they'd followed me. i never believed in my ability to bring people along, and now i resented that secret ability. i willed them to leave. they didn't.
he sat quietly in his chair. the rest of us stood awkwardly in the room. they must have sensed the shift, the fact that now this was a two-person conversation and they were peripheral. but they wouldn't let go of me. i had cajoled and charmed them, and in doing so, i had tied myself to them, and now they wouldn't leave me alone. i felt desperate.
i am a seasoned swallower of self-doubt; i didn't think he'd been paying attention when i played that song for him a month earlier. i was not beautiful, i was not interesting, i was not worth his time. not because i wasn't beautiful or interesting, but because i wanted to be beautiful and interesting. i believed that something about my desire to appeal to him made me unappealing.
so it came as a complete surprise to me when he started playing that song on his guitar. at first it was barely audible, and then i looked at him, and i could hear everything.]
we shared a secret that night. i started to sing, uncertain; he nodded and kept playing, encouraging me. i wished everyone would leave. i wished it didn't mean so much to me, since of course these ethereal imagined currents i felt would never fall out of the air into our hands, real things that led to real words and actions.
i couldn't believe that he saw something in me that was worth sounding out that song for. i was so nervous at lunch weeks later that i didn't pick up on it when he said, "when you come over, it's like a competition for your attention . . ." he'd noticed me parsing out my attention to everyone but him, not to spite him, but to insulate myself against the possibility that he didn't care for me. i'd insulated myself against him. i'd surrounded myself with others until there was no way he could get to me.
i had already played the entire thing out and ruined it for myself when weeks later we stood in the kitchen, in a circle of people who didn't know each other all that well, and talked about Over the Rhine. (jillian, you were there - do you remember? i was so deeply grateful you were there, i needed you, your bold voice filling the awkward spaces, our laughter ringing on the backs of the pots and pans.) he stood in the back row, shy, and spoke up, spoke to me in front of those people. i couldn't believe he would speak to me so i rejected it. it couldn't be true, so it wasn't.
[on the phone a few weeks later:
"no," he was almost pleading. "you're a very important person in my life . . ."
"yeah, yeah," i felt numb to his sincerity. there were so many opposite indications, and added to the stinging voices in my head, i was already convinced i meant nothing to him.]
today i miss him. everything that was on the verge
of happening and everything that never happened.
i miss that house and that room and that boy and
those eyes and that song
i played for him, the song i didn't think he heard.
i was wrong.
i
was
wrong.
why'd you love me in the first place?
you were always closer than a brother
i can barely look at your face
stealin away on a sunny day . . .
funny but i feel like i'm fallin
i wanna beg you to stay
i've said my piece
i'm on my knees
whatcha doin with your suitcase?
tryin to hit the ground with both feet runnin
aren't you trippin on your shoelace?
stealin' away on a sunny day . . .
[over the rhine]
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