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Valentine's Day post 2025
This all happened years ago when I was younger. The first part.
I once fell for this girl really hard. Thought about her all the time. Like, minute-to-minute. I couldn't eat sometimes, I was so enamored. I used to live my days wondering what she was doing, as if every space she filled were magical. Was she eating? With whom? Was some guy making her laugh? Would it be okay to send her a short message? Sometimes I would then send one on inspiration--a joke, a link to music, something else inane--then ride the buoyant wave of anticipation for a while, until I got no answer and no answer, and eventually my face burned with shame at my own fey sentimentality. Was I not a man? Had I not been raised to be tougher than this weak sniveller? God damn it.
Just being around her, though, was a thrill I had without questioning it, something I felt without having asked for it or willed it. I sometimes saw her from the bus, me riding, her out there walking and my heart skipped--literally I could feel that palpitation. She was a good deal younger than I was--tall, willowy, sure of herself. Beautiful. Her hair was in a popular style at the time, though rare now. When I did see her, time stood still. They say you should plan dates and do fun things--and it is true, you should, you must--but to me, truly just sitting on a bench with her was better than sailing to the Bahamas (which yes, I've done), if she were there on the bench with me. Just staring into air. All very corny. Pathetic even. What I'd warn anyone not to feel. The stuff of saccharine pop.
She left, though, and like a teenage girl I spent my time pining over her. Tried not to show it, did show it when drunk. My closest drinking buddy at the time was sympathetic but couldn't relate and told me just to move on, move on. Cease all communication. I tried. It worked for awhile. Still I'd wonder where she was. I could even stir a perfectly benign moment like waiting for a bus into an existential crisis of jealousy by simply imagining: "What if right now she is with some guy?" I ruined my own day many times by doing this.
I always wondered what it would be like to know her forever, and I actually envied her family--that they might know her for so many years, whereas I would almost surely be forgotten, and soon. It took a lot of alcohol and sinking into shallow self-indulgence to shut her out of my mind.
Then this and that happened and I married her and I left her sleeping this morning with her feet sticking out of the covers.
"Life is a trick. Life is a kitten in a sack." --Anne Sexton
Interesting. I've also had a moment with a girl I thought was a lesbian--she had had a girlfriend for about four years but had broken up with her. I think. If she hadn't then, she did later. She made very clear advances toward me. That sentence no doubt sounds like a boast, but there is no chance that I am mistaken in her intentions. There we were, lying on a futon in the guest room of my mutual friend, she and I beside each other, I assumed for sleep. And then she was slipping off her clothing until she was just in her panties. She arc'd around one long leg over my midsection until she was on top of me, and looking at me in the dim light told me that she would show me things I had never dreamed of.
It is difficult to explain my reaction. It's not that I doubted her; I didn't, and not because my dreams were pedestrian and asexual, as they certainly weren't at the time. But I had only known her as a lesbian for about two years.
I was struck with the sudden fear that is hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it--the knowledge that I was with a woman who knew extremely well not only the fairly easy methods of pleasuring a man, but also knew those of pleasuring another woman. And who had been a lover of and loved by a woman who also knew these skills. I was less practically educated in such matters then than I am now, but I don't think I was a slouch. Nevertheless something about the proposition made me go cold, and as I lay there, her poised above me bare-breasted, I mumbled something about friendship and awkwardness.
If you are doubting my sanity let me say that it is possible that I might have been obsessed with someone else at the time. It wouldn't have been unusual, as I often fixated on certain women. (Aside: I once asked a French professor, at a party of drunk people in Palolo Valley in Oahu, none of whom I knew but the host, if he didn't sometimes see a singular woman as so beautiful, so perfect, that every other woman was only beautiful in as much as she looked like the one you had in mind. He swirled around his red wine with ice in it in his glass ["You Americans are such snobs about ice in wine," he had said earlier. "Sometimes it needs it," and plopped in two ice cubes.] He looked at me and shrugged. "Of course," he said. "But that only lasts a couple of days.")
Anyway I shut her down. The almost naked athletic girl on top of me, I mean. And I learned something at that moment--well, I was to learn it, even if I did not realize it at the time. I learned that while men can come back from such a rebuff--some of us even grew up accustomed to at least one such hurdle in the pursuit of our goal--women, it became clear to me, do not take well to rejection of this sort. I'm sorry, Phoebe, if you're reading this. I was, as they say, a lot older then.
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