Accidental Details

I want to say that I liked you the moment I Saw you. I didn't. I didn't notice you the moment I saw you.

Candice mumbled something about "That's Brian's best friend..." But the light in the bar was dim, and the music was loud, and I mostly looked in a general direction, snatching snippets of flickering faces moving between dense and shifting shadows. And I barely knew Candice—let alone who "Brian" was—and I had only a vague inkling of why I should care.

And then we were moving on a hot, crowded dance floor—Candice and Erin and I—being jostled about by hot, sweaty bodies. The air was thick. Heavy. Humid. The wood slats of the floor worn and faded from a thousand-thousand shuffling steps; wet and slick in splotches of spilt beer.

A flash of red plaid drew my eye and there, next to Candice, was a thin, ruddy-faced Irishman. Candice, who was unhappy and drunk. But the Irishman smiled and, swaying there beside her, his presence seemed to calm her.

Fuzzy, alcohol-laden recollections drift through a dim haze. A dark corner, cold drinks, loud music. A man (faintly familiar) asking if I wanted to dance. The song was pop. Or maybe it was rap. I laughed—I thought I laughed to myself. It was aloud. You asked, "What?", and I replied with something like "I guess. This isn't really my kind of music—I don't dance to it very well." I do not recall your exact response, but you contradicted me. You might have said "You were doing just fine out there before." And it was then that I placed you. The Irishman.

And so I let you lead me. And we danced. And in lethargic, drunken passageways, random neural connections fired and managed to work out that you were Brian's best friend. Candice's Brian. And I think, then, that I decided you must be a too-young, cocky asshole—just like Brian.

But you didn't seem to mind that I was a poor dancer, and when a country song lilted into the stifling dance-hall air, I was surprised when you pulled me into the embrace of an effortless two-step; rocked me with a smooth, steady rhythm.

Your right arm held me flush against you, while your left hand gently clasped my right. I found myself appreciating the way my body conformed to yours. You were slender, broad shouldered, slim hipped. And my left arm curled fluidly about your musculature.

Still, it was not until later, at Denny's, that I really Saw you. Candice sat across from us in the booth: vacant shoes on the table, crying. Laughing and crying. Someone was texting her, and she laughed. She said, “This guy resembles hash-browns.” But Brian was in every tear that fell from her chin.

Somehow the matter of birthdays arose. I was taken aback to learn that yours was the same as mine. You were the only person I had ever met who shared my birthday.

That was when I actually Saw you for the first time—clearly, soberly—in the glaring, yellow light of a two-dollar diner. The brilliant smile. Intense green eyes, sparkling with laughter. A sculpted face with red-flushed cheeks and a chiseled jaw...

My gaze rose again, tracing the contours. This time vibrant sage met smoldering blue-grey. I smiled. You smiled. We both looked away.



Original post date: 5.1.2009

You Rotted My Soul

"You rotted my soul," Joel Elliott typed at me, with all the piss and vinegar, anger and hatred he could possibly muster and squeeze into the tiny pixels between those words—words that landed and cracked like a backhand to the face in a silent room.

I don't know what I ever did to Joel Elliott to rot his soul. It certainly was no goal I ever had.

I only wanted to be happy. Like, good-to-the-last-drop happy. The kind of happy you can build a life on. The kind of life that when you sit, rocking in your rocking chair in the twilight of life, you are still satisfied with—even after all those years...

And it's not as though I wanted to hoard all of that happiness. When you love someone, you want that level of satisfaction for your loved one as much as you want it for yourself. And you want it for them even if it means that that sort of happiness isn't going to be found with you.

And I would know. I've done my share of leaving for just that reason. It is an unspeakably heartbreaking reason to leave someone. And those you leave behind rarely understand it. And those who come to understand often won't do so until they find what they were meant to find. And then, in that moment, it is suddenly clear: your vision, what you wanted for them and what you wanted for yourself.

And maybe they won’t ever admit it aloud, but in that same moment, they are utterly relieved that you made the decisions you made. That you didn’t settle. That you didn’t let them settle. They look back at what the two of you had together and they sigh in utter relief that they are not still in that gimp of a relationship, barely eking out 'satisfied'—let alone 'happiness' (a concept which had become a wistfully distant echo of a wish—a thing dreamt of once, but long since ceased to believe existed).

True and lasting Happiness does exist. And life with the right person is not simply matter of hard work, communication and perseverance. Of course, any combination of those things will be necessary at times in any relationship, but in the right relationship, their application is the exception, not the rule...

But I digress. I was talking about soul-rotting. Right.

So the day after Joel Elliott sent me his love-note, someone else from my past, Eric Kattan, sends me a picture of an admissions folder from Columbia University. Yes, the Columbia University. He had been accepted to a master's program there. "And," he said, "I owe it all to you..."

Whether or not it is strictly true that Eric Kattan owes his admittance to Columbia University to me is a matter of debate. After all, it was he (and not I) who accomplished all of the hard work. Eric not only completed his undergraduate degree while working full-time as a network administrator, but he did so in grand fashion—grand enough to earn him admission to one of the top universities in the world.

But in all cases, I do know this: what we leave behind us lives in the perceptions of those we left behind. And those perceptions are, for all intents and purposes, Reality and Truth. For in our absence, there is no-one to speak for our intentions—no-one to correct inaccuracies.

So in this Reality, Eric Kattan owes his acceptance to Columbia University to me, and I rotted Joel Elliott's soul.

Intent is immaterial.

Eric's kind thoughts did manage to somewhat soothe the sting of Joel's biting attack. And while I do not mean to imply that I deserve to only ever have kind thoughts conjured of me, I do mean to make clear that my intent has been good, even if, at times, misguided.

And so this is a wish, spoken aloud: may I leave more good than bad behind me. May the flowers of spring bloom in the wake of my footprints, and not the withering decay of fall.


Original post date: 4.9.2009

Echoes

I know what she sees in you. I saw the same thing. The difference is: I saw, and knew it wasn't mine.

There was something about the way you carried your god-damned uniform, with LENIHAN marching orderly in blocky, black lettering across your breast. Something both primal and secure about the gun you kept within reach at the head of the bed. Something tender and sweet in the way you rubbed my back in the early morning sun, the morning after the night we met. Something sensual in the cool slip of those luscious sheets over naked flesh—mine and yours, loosely tangled, newly sated. Something raw in the way you kissed me, something wild in the way you fucked me. Barely tempered. Barely tamed.

But the things I saw in you—(at moments, and in turn) a husband, a lover, a protector, a provider—were not glimpses of a thing that exists. They were echoes of the future—of the man you will become.

And never were you mine. Though it was a beautiful idea.


Original post date: 3.9.2009