Leftovers

'Bina and I ordered Chinese carryout last night for dinner. I felt so inexplicably sad I couldn't stop crying. I felt alone, and that I was always going to be alone. And I wasn't forgetting my women friends who flank me on all sides. There's another kind of alone. And only a lover can touch that place. Or God. I felt like I did when I was a kid and I first understood that my parents couldn't do anything for me--that I would always need a backup plan for when the bottom dropped out.

I had talked to my youngest sister when I got home from the museum, and I shared with her why I was uneasy. I tried to paint the picture of having had a good time, for the most part, but I had a sour taste in my mouth, and so that is the impression that came through the clearest. We weren't able to finish our conversation because she got interrupted... Later, though, she called me and left a voicemail message telling me not to be discouraged because she felt that these incidents were designed, in part, to help me have perspective. She emphasized that he was with me yesterday, not those other people, because he was not supposed to be there with any of them...
And she said that he's not ready now, but that when he is, I'll be the one standing in front of him, the person he should have seen all the time.

I can't say enough how much I needed that.

And I realized that there are all sorts of things, important things that I, in my myopia, left out about yesterday.

There was the moment Gordon asked me if I had ever been to Paris, and when I said no, he just looked at me and said "Oh, you have to go someday..."

There was the novel I told him I want to read, simply entitled Gordon by Edith Templeton (?). He said that maybe he'd have to get that for me, and then he quipped "Gordon from Gordon..."

Then there was the way he talked to me about paintings that mean a lot to him, and quoted scenes from Woody Allen movies, and smiled at me sympathetically when my umbrella malfunctioned.

Or maybe I should also mention that he told me how much he hurts when his friends abandon him, how much he ached when he felt a particularly dear friend distance himself, and how now he has learned to stop wanting that person to be in his life.

Would it help if I said that I find it so charming that he and I both wear sweaters, and other decidedly wintery clothes, in June? Or that I kept wanting to brush a couple of wayward hairs behind his ears, or that we had a running dialogue about careers he should pursue? A birthday party clown, a record producer, a tour guide, and mayor of a small town are what we've come up with so far.

The latter is because he told me all about his campaign and dramatic election as Student Body President his senior year of Highschool. He got the students vending machines and hot lunches to name two things he delivered. They called him King President, at least according to him.

I told him that I was the manager of the Tennis team and the Editor-N-Chief of the literary magazine. It was like peering through a glass at the past at who we used to be. I wished on some level that he'd known me then, and that I'd known him, but then I was glad that we didn't. Knowing how much pain we both had ahead of us when we were 17, I'm glad we didn't. I know I met him when I was supposed to.