I just heard the news third hand that the crush of my youth just divorced. Split, separated, no longer a them, just a he. This man who was for a decade of my life and our friendship, unhavable. Because we were both permenantly partnered we were backed hopelessly into the awkward corner of just friends. But he was like no other friend, he was the kind of friend who made me swoon and obsess about the possibilities of "if". This is what life is made up of. The not having, the wanting, the "if" of life.
He was finishing his PHD in Anthropology at the time, the hipster of all hipsters, he indulged me in jarring up pickles from cucumbers we had grown or helped to assemble brigades of friends to glean and process olives from the university campus because he knew these were my interests. He wore vintage collared shirts with the shiny shell buttons. The kind of shirt that can only be worn if nicely pared with whatever irony he had left in his pocket and a pair of expensive designer sun glasses. The glasses were there to remind you that the shirt was intentionally culled and had nothing to do with poverty forcing him to shop in thrift stores.
He called me sunshine and hugged me big when he saw me. At parties he played the guitar and sang me funky melodic alternative toons. This music on account of him is still deeply apart of what makes my heart flutter. A small fact that even my latest boyfriend managed to unintentionally exploit.
He introduced me to fancy anthropology mind leaps like liminal space as we foraged for wild edible mushrooms. He once invited me to the yucatan in mexico for an Anthropology conference ignoring our collective spouses. I spent a decade wishing I had enough money and confidence to buy that ticket, as I somehow knew that was the moment where my life would have turned left instead of holding a steady constant of straight. I ignored the temptation to be frivilous and prolonged the eventual heart break for life.
When my belly was swollen and pregnant with my first and only child I joined him and others out one night for our regular friday happy hour. Me sipping a virgin bloody mary with extra green olives and wearing a clingy choclate brown dress that was my staple of pregnancy. I proudly showed off all that was my bulging tight belly and felt naively and egotistically that I was somehow redefining motherhood and sexy at the sametime.The desert summer night was dry and hot and he walked me away from the bar and across the street to the bookstore. He grabbed me by the arm to save me from the traffic as we crossed. "I sometimes wish that was my baby inside you" he wispered so quietly I almost didn't hear it. I pretended he didn't say it and we walked into the bookstore in silence knowing that there was no way to fix this problem of want.
It took me years to get over this man whose wife I eventually befriended to apease my guilt for wanting him. I was who he called the morning his daughter was born to come help them learn to swaddle an infant and change a diaper. I drove to california instead, running from the sting of this new permenant part of his life that was not mine.
Now as I see his photos on instagram I see only a stranger, the want is long gone. The want is only a line on my forhead, a remnant of my imagination.
This story is one that makes me me, unrequited lust and shared friendship. I am nothing now but a thousand stories like this, stories of love and want and life that are even now unfolding. As I walked the streets of singapore yesturday I pondered all the faces in front of me. Thier lines, thier wrinkles, thier eyes. What wants and needs and regrets did these people carry with them in thier laps as they rode the subway?
This is life, the having is only half of it, the rest is all want. Gritty, and messy and beautiful. Want.
