My favorite song for about fifteen years has been “Blister in the Sun.” Don’t ask me why, because I have no idea. I am not a particularly raging fan of the Violent Femmes in general, but for some reason that one song sends me into fits. I thrash, I howl, I long for a set of drums, usually don’t find any, but beat the air nevertheless along with those two miraculous beats that follow the bass lick. It’s very, very strange. Back when disposable income was allowance, it never occurred to me to buy the CD, so whenever the song would come on the radio (which was rare) it would be like Christmas had come early. I remember one very particular instance, driving somewhere during high school while I lived in California, when suddenly my favorite radio station bestowed a miracle. Upon reflection, I was probably in moderate danger of driving my car off the road. The sheer joy of hearing the song was enough to burn specific instances into my memory.
Not too long after, I bought the CD. And not too long after that, I got an iPod. Suddenly the intense joy that had been at the fickle mercy of a radio station was mine to have whenever I wanted it: literally at my fingertips. What followed was very natural and disgustingly trite. It just wasn’t the same anymore. I still love listening to the song, and I still pull it up after a particularly hard day and thrash around my apartment to the familiar bass lick. But that sheer, unadulterated burst of joy has diminished.
And so, it is with annoying self-awareness that I admit to myself that maybe it is a good thing that I cannot find the one person I would kill to track down.
His name is John, and we met in Rome in the spring of 2006. As if that circumstance alone were not special enough, he was also the first guy I had ever met who had seen me for exactly who I was… and liked it. And hadn’t been afraid to show it. On the spectrum of personalities, I suppose I’ve always leaned more towards the loud, intelligent, eccentric side, which did not particularly help my dating efforts in high school and college. Most of the guys who were interested seemed to like me in spite of a lot of my qualities, as if in liking me, they were going against their better judgment. John liked the whole package: sign, sealed, delivered. It also helped that he was sweet, kind, hilarious, and blisteringly smart. When he used the word “ostentatious” in a sentence, while sounding neither self-conscious nor like an asshole, I nearly keeled over from joy right there on the street. The soft southern accent and a smile that could floor me from twenty paces didn’t hurt either.
We were not together for very long, but all of it was like Christmas morning; like a vast extension of the blissful instant when I realized “Blister in the Sun” had just come on the radio. When it came time for us to go back to our respective schools in the states, we agreed that building a long distance relationship on three weeks probably wasn’t the best idea. I think what we didn’t say but also agreed on was that we didn’t want to ruin it: take something wonderful and organic, and stretch it and twist it to be something we weren’t sure it could be. And so he went back to Alabama, and I went back to New Hampshire, always missing him a little bit but armed with the knowledge that it was possible that there were guys out there who could and would treat me the way he had.
The following Christmas, we exchanged a few emails: easy, flirty, happy. The following year, upon graduating, I lost my college email account along with his email address. I had forgotten to transfer it into my new account, and my solid, real world link to him was gone.
And no, he’s not on facebook. And unfortunately, he shares a name with a horrid, famous golfer. So social networking and google are out, and I am pathetically stumped. I go through phases where I’m suddenly inspired to find him, and frustratingly unable to do so. I often wonder where he is, and while I flatly ignore the possibility that he could in fact be married out there somewhere, I have to realize on some level it could be true. Whatever the case may be, though, I really hope that he’s happy, wherever he is.
In a strange way, I have found a backwards sort of joy in the opposite of instant gratification: the one that got away. I can’t find him, and realistically, I probably never will. But I am very grateful to have met him, known him, and been genuinely, thrashing around like a moron, beating on invisible drums to a bass lick wild about him. Not being able to find him, or pull him up on facebook, or google track him doesn’t change that. I hate to admit it, but maybe it makes it better.
Nevertheless, as far as sheepish truths go, my enduring hope to find him someday may be the best one I have. And hey, stranger things have happened. Believe me, I’ve been there for a few: imagine being an eight year old girl howling along with, “I’m high as I ki-ite I just mi-ight stop to check you out…”
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
It's the Same Old Song
For those of us of the more human looking persuasion (I am not a troll, nor am I Angelina Jolie), I think a very common occurrence, even a rite of passage, is wanting someone you can never have, someone who will never want you back. In my case, I’d observe whoever he was from afar, fully aware that reality and my own cowardice would never permit anything remotely resembling romance to spring up. Someone coined a phrase for it: “He’s out of my league.” Sometimes you see someone so breathtakingly and impossibly beautiful and wonderful, you doubt that he or she is even in the same sport.
In my experience, these people, often without their even knowing it, carry with them expectations and fantasies, which frequently have nothing to do with who they are. Sometimes, though, you love someone whom you do know, and if you are imaginative-minded like myself, you concoct all sorts of wonderful scenarios in which this person will come to his or her senses and miraculously, perfectly, find that he or she loves you back.
That kind of love is like a wound that doesn’t heal. In one of my favorite series of books, The Belgariad, they talk about how when a god is wounded, he’s wounded permanently. Humans were built to break and heal; gods were never meant to break, so they don’t have the capability to heal. Does that mean I have a godly wound, or that I just have many, many years of therapy ahead of me? Possibly both.
There’s another wrinkle though, as there usually is: this wound/love doesn’t have to be romantic in nature. In my case, my longest obsession, the person who will never want me back, is my sister.
I nursed this bleeder for many years, not even knowing what it was, until recently, when after yet another hurtful incident that left me feeling like a twelve-year-old at twenty-three, my brain out of sheer desperation gave me the answer. I wonder sometimes if you have to hit a critical mass of emotion before something becomes clear. In this case, it was the following: I am not good enough for her to want.
At least, I figure that’s her logic, deep down next to her bones where people’s ugly truth lies.
The irony is that some of the most wonderful people in the world (in my opinion) do need me, and love me, and see me for exactly who I am. But why do we place the most value on the thing we can never have? This is not to say that I don’t see what I have: I do, and I appreciate it more than my own grasp of language can express. The people I love build my insides, but that means, unfortunately, that part of my insides is always bleeding.
Part of me, a growing part of me, has grown so tired of the same emotions, playing over and over again within me. The Four Tops said it best: it's the same old song. After all, it’s the same old rejection. She has not ever noticed I grew into someone very much worth liking (if I do say so myself), so her rejection is the same rejection that it was ten years ago. And the self that can step away from that horrible, wonderful, sacred core of who you are in your family, the self that went away to college and found out that who I am is perfectly fine exactly the way she is: that self finds this same old rejection very tedious.
My brain has hit several critical masses lately, because another gem came to me when I was brushing my teeth in the middle of all this mess: If after nearly twenty-four years, I don’t have your good opinion, maybe it’s not worth having.
And yet, and yet… a crush on that beautiful person in the distance does not go away because you tell it to. My aching want to have my sister see me and like me and need me does not go away because I have become a whole person on my own. I believe we don’t leave our old selves behind: we absorb them. They’re in there somewhere. So I have twenty-two years worth of selves who want her, and one who is willing to walk away. I am having a hard time overcoming my own inertia.
Is it masochism? Is it that hope springs eternal? Are the two mutually exclusive? Maybe it is simply a part of a very human condition: loving someone you can’t have. Hopefully the selves I’m growing into will be stronger than the ones I have absorbed, because I don’t like to think that I have another twenty-two years to wait before being able to walk away.
In my experience, these people, often without their even knowing it, carry with them expectations and fantasies, which frequently have nothing to do with who they are. Sometimes, though, you love someone whom you do know, and if you are imaginative-minded like myself, you concoct all sorts of wonderful scenarios in which this person will come to his or her senses and miraculously, perfectly, find that he or she loves you back.
That kind of love is like a wound that doesn’t heal. In one of my favorite series of books, The Belgariad, they talk about how when a god is wounded, he’s wounded permanently. Humans were built to break and heal; gods were never meant to break, so they don’t have the capability to heal. Does that mean I have a godly wound, or that I just have many, many years of therapy ahead of me? Possibly both.
There’s another wrinkle though, as there usually is: this wound/love doesn’t have to be romantic in nature. In my case, my longest obsession, the person who will never want me back, is my sister.
I nursed this bleeder for many years, not even knowing what it was, until recently, when after yet another hurtful incident that left me feeling like a twelve-year-old at twenty-three, my brain out of sheer desperation gave me the answer. I wonder sometimes if you have to hit a critical mass of emotion before something becomes clear. In this case, it was the following: I am not good enough for her to want.
At least, I figure that’s her logic, deep down next to her bones where people’s ugly truth lies.
The irony is that some of the most wonderful people in the world (in my opinion) do need me, and love me, and see me for exactly who I am. But why do we place the most value on the thing we can never have? This is not to say that I don’t see what I have: I do, and I appreciate it more than my own grasp of language can express. The people I love build my insides, but that means, unfortunately, that part of my insides is always bleeding.
Part of me, a growing part of me, has grown so tired of the same emotions, playing over and over again within me. The Four Tops said it best: it's the same old song. After all, it’s the same old rejection. She has not ever noticed I grew into someone very much worth liking (if I do say so myself), so her rejection is the same rejection that it was ten years ago. And the self that can step away from that horrible, wonderful, sacred core of who you are in your family, the self that went away to college and found out that who I am is perfectly fine exactly the way she is: that self finds this same old rejection very tedious.
My brain has hit several critical masses lately, because another gem came to me when I was brushing my teeth in the middle of all this mess: If after nearly twenty-four years, I don’t have your good opinion, maybe it’s not worth having.
And yet, and yet… a crush on that beautiful person in the distance does not go away because you tell it to. My aching want to have my sister see me and like me and need me does not go away because I have become a whole person on my own. I believe we don’t leave our old selves behind: we absorb them. They’re in there somewhere. So I have twenty-two years worth of selves who want her, and one who is willing to walk away. I am having a hard time overcoming my own inertia.
Is it masochism? Is it that hope springs eternal? Are the two mutually exclusive? Maybe it is simply a part of a very human condition: loving someone you can’t have. Hopefully the selves I’m growing into will be stronger than the ones I have absorbed, because I don’t like to think that I have another twenty-two years to wait before being able to walk away.
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