I mentioned yesterday that in my drinking days there was a fair amount of free-flowing affection inside my circle of friends (which largely consisted of hugging), but that there was very little in the way of romantic crossover.
There were times when the circle expanded (and later contracted, as necessary) to include those people with whom existing circle members had become intimate, but that doesn’t really count as romance among the members of the inner circle.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t a great deal of unrequited desire; quite the reverse, in fact, but that almost never led anywhere.
I think one of the best examples involved a girl named Sarah, who, of the inner circle members, was easily the most attractive. Sarah was very pretty, but not exactly the most refined or ladylike young woman in the world, nor would she have been renowned for her restraint and chastity.
Still, she was fun, and I liked her a great deal.
In any case, in the earliest days of my burgeoning social life I had become friends with a member of what eventually expanded to become my circle of friends named Aaron.
Aaron was an odd young man who very clearly had a number of mental and emotional dysfunctions. Still, we got along.
In any case, Aaron had a very strong attraction to/obsession with Sarah, and was always trying to insinuate himself into her good graces. Whenever the group was together he would just hover around her, totally oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making her, or to the fact that Sarah did not, and would never, return his affections.
I remember a particular after-party at the house of someone who owned a boa constrictor.
For the record, I really don’t like snakes. However, while I would probably seriously injure anyone who tried to get me to touch or hold a snake, my fear is not so intense that I can’t be near snakes, watch them on TV or in movies, or avoid panicking at the mere mention of them.
Aaron, however, did have such an extreme fear.
In a stroke of sheer genius, Sarah had the snake placed around her neck, wearing it like a scarf for the remainder of the time we spent at the party and was thereby able to go one night without having Aaron hovering around her.
While I was absolutely horrified at the thought of actually doing such a thing, I remember being greatly amused as I watched the conflict play itself out on Aaron’s face as he was torn between fear and desire.
There are too many stories of unrequited love and thick-headed ignorance preventing people from seeing what was right in front of them to recount here, and none of them is quite as amusing as the story of Aaron and the Snake.
On the topics of Sarah and free-floating affection, though, I do recall that I had a habit of kissing Sarah on the top of her head in something of an affectionate gesture, though this was invariably done through the baseball cap she tended to wear most nights.
One night when I was extremely drunk (even for me), I did try to initiate an actual kiss with Sarah (and was fairly persistent, though not forceful), and was soundly rejected.
She stated that it would be “too weird,” and would have a deleterious (not her word) effect on our friendship, and ultimately I relented.
(As an aside, I should mention that it is an unfortunate truth that during my drinking career I frequently suffered from blackouts. However, it’s an even more unfortunate truth that I didn’t suffer from them anywhere near frequently enough. Most mornings I was able to successfully, and regretfully, recall at least 99% of the previous evening’s examples of my deplorable drunken behavior. Typically I only forgot the more banal, and therefore less embarrassing and outright humiliating, aspects of the evening, such as the walk, or stumble, home. And when I did actually manage to forget some especially mortifying act, I always had friends who were more than happy to fill in the blanks for me…)
Some time later I discussed this embarrassing event with my friend Jeff, who responded with the less than helpful comment, “Yeah, Sarah and I got it on a while ago.”
I recall being annoyed by this because Jeff and Sarah were closer friends than Sarah and I were, and had been friends longer, and yet somewhere along the line she had been perfectly willing to risk ruining her friendship with him.
If I were some sort of crazed optimist insisting on seeing the glass as half-full (though my glass was very seldom half-full in those days), I would think, “Gee, Sarah’s friendship with me must mean more to her than her friendship with Jeff, since she was willing to risk ruining it by actually having sex with him, whereas she wouldn’t even give me a simple kiss.”
Ah, if only I could be a self-deluding idio-errrr, optimist.
Still, I do recall a particular encounter with Sarah that indicated that she did feel a great deal of affection for me.
In the late spring of 1999 I had headed to Minnesota to stay with my friend Eric and his wife Sally to sort of test the waters and see if it was a place I would be willing to settle and try to find a job. After a couple of weeks I decided that it was, and so, with Eric in tow, I headed back to Michigan to clear out my apartment and pick up my car.
After a long day of packing and moving things out, Eric, my brother-in-law Dean, and I hit the bar.
Sarah was there, on a date, which was fairly odd, given that typically she just “hooked up” with guys and seldom actually dated, but as soon as she spotted me she came running over to throw her arms around me.
She kept coming back over to my table to hug me, and couldn’t pass by on her way to the restroom without pausing to give me a quick squeeze, which, I’m sure, bothered her date to no end.
So evidently my absence, as brief as it had been, had made her heart grow much fonder for me.
The last time I saw Sarah was in the spring of 2003 when I’d gone home for a visit. I hadn’t really encountered any of my friends from the drinking period while I was home, since I obviously wasn’t going to be hitting the bars, and I had lost phone numbers and e-mail addresses and whatnot in the time since I’d quit drinking.
So it was actually while I was at the airport waiting for my flight back to VA that I saw Sarah, who was there to apply for a job.
She informed me that she had recently become a mother and that motherhood had considerably mellowed her behavior, so she hardly saw any of our old friends anymore.
I suppose that’s just another example of how most changes are born out of necessity (Necessity is, after all, a mother), and how sometimes it can be difficult, or even impossible, to include others in the changes we make to our lives.
On the topic of changes, today marks the two-year anniversary of me starting my current job.
November 27th had marked the two-year point since I arrived in VA.
Coming out here for this job was a very significant change in my life, since for one thing it necessitated moving clear across the country, but in the intervening time I have settled into a fairly unchanging rut.
For the sake of the rut itself if nothing else, I hope that the next major change isn’t quite as extreme.
Besides, sometimes I think I may have maxed out my ability to adapt.
But whatever. Another weekend is nearly upon me, so I should attend to the remaining loose ends of the week before I'm off to bed to begin my three day long journey into still more pointless and directionless time off so that I can begin the cycle anew.
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