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Lindsay and I knew each other in high school, but we weren't friends. There's a funny story about how he was my English-class rival. There's another funny story about how he had braces until senior year, and how I once absently thought about deflowering him. I told those stories at cocktail parties, and it made our relationship seem fated, blessed with a dash of determinism, when in fact, it was unexpected and random and not entirely convenient. I had planned to move to New York. I was applying to grad schools in faraway places. I wanted to fall in love with some dangerous, East Coast artist type, whereas Lindsay was a business-systems analyst who drove a Passat. Even when things went well — and they often went very well — it was hard to trade in what I had imagined for myself for the soft comfort of his cozy apartment, a rented video and a bottle of wine, him snoring lightly beside me. Was it enough? Would anything ever be?
The moment I accused him of being gay became a joke between us. Afterward, we went to some fancy restaurant, and laughed about it over a bottle of wine and few overpriced delicacies. This was our response to most arguments, as it turned out. To boredom and excitement. Our wallets were stuffed with yellow credit-card receipts for amounts we'd rather not think about, the car littered with matches from some new restaurant, some old restaurant, some restaurant we'd been to and forgotten we hated.
We were at our favorite Greek place the first time I remember crying in a restaurant with him. This was months later, and I had just returned from a trip in San Francisco, nose still dappled with sun and starting to flake. I had been kicking hard to get out of Texas in those days, and the trip to San Francisco had reignited my wanderlust. As we nibbled on the last few remaining olives, I blathered on about blue skies and mountains and the crashing Pacific Ocean and he would love it, I said, I just knew he would have to love it.
He sighed. "Can we talk about something else?"
Before the first drop even hit the china, his face had registered my tears. I was actually still thinking that perhaps the dim amber lighting hid my glassy eyes, but then his brow knitted, and he stuck out his lip a bit in sympathy, and the tears really started flowing, even as I tried to choke them back like hiccups, chased with a forkful of Greek salad.
It seemed silly to cry at that moment, at that restaurant, just like it would seem silly every time I found myself crying in restaurants. He was never mean to me. He never said rude, abusive things. But what I heard in his voice, what I felt and
I couldn't date him because he held his taco wrong. |
couldn't articulate, what came spilling down my face was this: He would never leave Dallas. We would never stop having this conversation. We would never stop wanting the other to change. We would spend our weekends in these restaurants, holding hands across a table or then sometimes, not holding hands, fiddling with a napkin, scraping a fork across an empty plate.
As it turns out, I was right. But at the time, I thought maybe I was just catastrophizing.
The truth is that I'm not terribly good at falling in love. I'm like one of those people who stands at the top of an amusement-park ride, letting everyone in line go ahead of them, staring down the terrifying precipice and dragging out the painful moments as long as possible. From the moment I started seeing Lindsay, I started hunting around for an escape hatch: I couldn't date him because he lived in another city; I couldn't date him because he wanted to go into advertising; I couldn't date him because he drove a Passat, or held his taco wrong. But I also knew that most of this hysterical flinching was just my way of avoiding the ugly, messy business of falling in love with someone.
Two years later, Lindsay would ask me to move out, and I would come very close to breaking every dish in our house, and I would move to New York, and he would fall in love with someone else. But I didn't know that was going to happen. Well, even if I did know, I was still a little curious how it might unfold.
The waitress picked up our empty plates, careful to avoid my wet eyes. "Can I get you two anything else?"
Lindsay gave me a nervous glance. "I think we'll just take the check," he said, grabbing the tips of my fingers underneath the table.
"Actually, you know what?" I smiled and looked up at her. "Why don't we have another round?" n°
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. |
©2007 Sarah Hepola and Nerve.com |
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