Author and Columnist
Yesterday, I saw my friend Kendall. She has been one of my closer friends long before this psychological incarnation. She knew me pre-Jen. (As I was explaining last night, I judge time on the basis of who I was dating at the time, much as time was judged BC. "It is year 12 in the reign of Augustus.") I barely knew myself pre-Jen.
I recall Kendall and you being close for a while. I'm sure she was deserving of this, but I remember so little of your friendship in detail. Kendall is vague in my memory. She loved U2 and Star Wars. She had her pack of Cold Spring friends -- she still does that I am aware. Beyond that, I hope future entries refresh my recollections, but I have nothing concrete.
I remember this night, though I do still cringe because of it.
There was some friction because you also felt close to Allison, who considered herself Kendall's mortal enemy. I don't recall if Kendall felt the same way, only that they had once been best friends and no longer were because some older man had seduced them both. It wasn't worth the grief, but it is impossible to see when entangled in it. You are evidence of that.
Of course, I wish you placed less importance on the women you let into your bed. You should not mark the eons of your life by them. Find some other metric. Colleges, cars, authors, or bands with whom you are obsessed. Not bedmates.
I was visiting with her owing to the fact that I told her I had a dream about her and this led to her confessing she was attracted to me. Before you think I am a worse hypocrite than I have made myself out to be, I agreed to see her before I decided I wanted to be alone. I try my hardest not to break promises.
This is convoluted. Why would it be hypocritical to see your female friend? Though you adored her, you had no romantic designs on Kendall, so what would be the issue with visiting her? Or did you visit her because she said she was attracted to you?
After having my epiphany the other night, I was less than looking forward to being around someone I cared about who was attracted to me.
Ah, there we are. We shall take as a given that I think you are stupid. Not clueless. You knew what you were doing, more or less. You had a series of relatively minor rejections from women who might have been more significant.
You knew what might happen there, should things spark, and you wouldn't be hosing them down.
You were not attracted to Kendall. She slotted into the "best friend/sister" archetype ever since you met her and never managed to break from it, no matter how your fondness intensified. As such, you were callous with a close friend because the idea of someone attracted to you was intoxicating.
I did not, however, engage in reverse peristalsis when we kissed.
I still maintain that you threw up exactly once, in the bushes outside Kate's dorm because she drew you back into the emotional and sexual turmoil of your post-dating relationship. You didn't want to kiss Amanda, I know, but I don't think you vomited because of it.
Does it need saying that you should not have kissed Kendall? Not because you didn't want to kiss her and not because you were not attracted to her in the right way. You should not have kissed her because she was your friend and this was a careless, rash thing. You were not considering her feelings.
I will not dwell on the events of the day, but to say that, by nightfall, we had reestablished to feeling nothing but friendship. Much to our mutual relief.
I wish you had so that I did not fill this in from what I remember, imperfect though this might be.
The total time of your kissing did not exceed a minute or five individual acts of kissing. The moment your lips were on hers, your stomach lurched. You knew that you had done something that could damage you both. (Or I transcended time to punch you.) You didn't want to be her boyfriend and assumed kissing her was as good as a contract.
I don't believe that she asked you to be her boyfriend, mind you. You just kissed a little bit, and you had kissed plenty with whom nothing more occurred. However, this was Kendall and not some sexy girl who locked lips with you in the mosh pit at The Chance. Kendall would matter the next day. (The girl from The Chance called you on your birthday for years and would talk a while, though you had no contact between these. It is such a strange thing to have done that I still remember her name and regard her with small warmth.)
I don't know if she felt more positively about it than you did.
Did the two of you take separate cars down to Tarrytown? I'm not sure that makes sense, but that is how I remember: you panicking in the backseat, trying to figure out how you were going to break up with the friend who had not asked you to be in a romantic relationship.
How did the conversation that you would not be dating go? I know that she said it, not you. I remember your relief that you didn't have to hurt Kendall more than impetuosity might have.
Steph was about on my level of off-handed, fanciful quips (there was an on-going story developing between us about how the Chinese food establishments bred her to fool Americans, as she was blonde haired and blue eyed, and how the owners of the place were going to feed us dishwater tea). I must say it was refreshing and inspiring that I am not alone in being as I am. I wish I could speak to her again and become her friend, but it is unlikely as she goes to college... um... elsewhere. (I couldn't figure out where the city was where she attended college).
You mean that you were attracted to her. An hour after kissing your close friend and dreading the aftershocks, you are lightly flirting with a woman whose boyfriend is a seat away.
Nowadays, we have social media, so you stay in contact with people for whom you felt considerably less than this woman who, to my knowledge, you met only once.
For instance, though we are not social media friends, I know who Ben is, to whom he is married, and how many children they have. If I cared to -- and I don't -- I do not doubt that I could use his profile to find any women he knows who are named some variation of "Steph." What would be the point, though? "Hey, we were weird at one another for a few hours two decades ago... how have you been?"
I am currently sick, you see. I need my rest.
You especially should not kiss friends when you are infectious, you dope. Even your immune system wanted to keep you from kissing Kendall.
I am not used to bars, as I do not drink and have no interest to. Had I, I would merely get a bottle of delicious wine and enjoy it with friends at home, not strangers in a place with no atmosphere and overpriced drinks.
You are even pretentious in things you aren't going to do. It's almost impressive.
I, as established, am not a bar person. After drinking my ginger ale (ordered under the clever assumption that it looked more like alcohol than a coke and even had ale in the name. Thus I would be incognito as someone who has no interest in getting smashed.), we watched a cover band which really was of little note (save that I liked the guitarist's style and the singer got better as she got drunker). I could little pay attention.
Here is one of my issues with you. It may not be my biggest one, but it interlocks with others. You make some written show of being a sensitive aesthete, but you do so little. Just like this night, in this bar, you sit in a corner and pretend. I'm not suggesting that you pound a mug of beer, but you skate over the experience, slightly above and to the left. You are there, but you are not present. Worse, you judge everyone who is enjoying their time there because you are scared. It is easier for you to be snotty and lord over them that you are a teetotaler who could not on his best day play covers at a bar.
It is braver to try to connect with the night before you. You blundered with Kendall, and, bless her, it turned out okay. Now you are in a situation worth chronicling, and you have no apparent interest in making it noteworthy.
First my attention was caught by the indoor koi pond the bar had. I sat by it for ten minutes, stunned by the fish. Would they be so beautiful if their condition were different? Here they were, trapped in a small, open tank in a minuscule bar situated on the edge of the Hudson River.
Oh, how deep you must be to look at fish. Wow, buddy. Anything to avoid the moment.
Then I remembered that goldfish only have memories of a few seconds. So the situation is constantly new and shocking for them.
They don't. Their brains are not astounding, I'll grant you, but it is naive to continue to believe that a creature could have survived the wrath of evolution with an inability to recall where they had found a source of food and a place to hide.
Also? Koi and goldfish are different species. Both carp, but not the same.
Yet they swam (as though they have a choice. I am fairly sure goldfish need to swim constantly or they die), because the tank was a constant adventure to them, they didn't know they had seen it and their brother fish a million times before.
You are thinking of sharks, and it is still not all of them.
So, where is your excuse not to keep moving forward? Why do you cling to your stagnant water? Aren't you suffocating yourself with this high-minded nonsense? When will you let yourself have an adventure, or are you pretending that you don't remember your burning jealousy that others fully indulge in their contexts?
There was nothing I could do that would matter here.
You could pay your friends half the attention that you did fish. I think you were waiting for another scared person to see you on the edge of the pond so you could offer these contrived observations, and they might think you were erudite at twenty.
I slowly rocked (to the beat of the music to appear less conspicuous) to watch the rainbows dance for me. I wonder how many others have realized that the mirrors made rainbows?
I would guess in the neighborhood of everyone. Rainbows aren't subtle, this was your first and only visit, and other people are more observant because they allow themselves to see outside their expectations.
So I stumbled out of the door, sans any manner of warmer clothing than my velour shirt. The shock of cold perked my right up, but my lungs still craved the crisp freshness of the night air.
You write these things such that I know you are trying to ape Anne Rice.
I do not intend this as a compliment, so please do not take it as such.
A sharp pang darted through me as this invoked the memory of Old Kate (Old Kate I am still much in love with, New Kate, the one usually mentioned here, is just a very close friend. They are, however, the same person).
Leave Kate alone. Stop being in love with the rearview mirror. You are not going that way.
For a moment, I nearly let my mind say, "I wish Kate were here with me." But instead, my mind said, "I am glad I am here to see this."
I'm glad you were too. I only wish that you had let yourself be there more.
Not surprisingly, my attention veered again. Surprising, it was to the femmes occupying the bar.
This is the least surprising thing you could say.
Also, my one-per gag is being expended for calling women "femmes" without self-awareness.
I passed quick glances over many. I rolled the thought of attraction through my mind. It didn't fit. Yet I still looked, appraised, considered. Necks, lips, arms, eyes, lashes, fingers, teeth. Intrigued, but not attracted.
They are not asking you to be attracted. They are not there for you but themselves. You are not a rainbow to the women in the bar.
Then it fell upon me, the curtain opening. I saw the bar exactly as I saw the koi pond.
Other way around, buddy. You are the one stuck in a tiny pond, surrounded by excitement, and unaware of anything but your walls when the vast world, when terrifying freedom, is ten feet away. .