To a Boy Who Will Never Know

So, I wrote this thing last night because I was feeling sincerely mushy and girly. And because I wanted imaginary closure. It's the first thing I've written in over six months, I think, and I had the biggest, stupidest smile on my face as I typed the last few sentences. Save me.

To a Boy Who Will Never Know

I fell in love with you when I was 19. And it was in my twentieth year that I think I fell so completely for you that my life changed. Whether in a miniscule or major way, I spent the better part of my twentieth year so completely enamoured with you that I forgot that other boys existed.

You went away just before I turned 21. You went to Japan for six months that turned into 12 months that turned into 18 months. It was a working holiday and we used to joke that you’d get married to a Japanese girl while there.

“Married or knocked up,” I said, fork stabbed into a piece of lettuce. We were sitting in the break room. It must’ve been a Saturday; I rarely worked any other day because of uni. You rarely ate during your lunch break and I used to wonder how you managed such a seasonable weight when skipping lunch. Sure, people say skipping breakfast makes you gain weight but shouldn’t that mean that skipping lunch makes you lose weight?

“Nah,” you said. You smiled and, inwardly, I cried out in absolute delight. I was a delusional little girl then. I was so taken by you, your every smile, laugh. Every nuance, every movement. It was almost sad.

“You say that now!” I joked.

“No way,” you said, steadfastly. You were always steadfast.

“Yeah, we’ll see. Do you have facebook? I want to see your pictures from Japan,” I said. I tried to maintain my cool but I was really nauseous at the thought I might never see or hear from you again.

I think that only teenage girls can understand the feelings to which I refer. Only teenage girls know the extensive range and intensity of emotions that one can feel. The sad thing was that I wasn’t a teenage girl then. I was 20, technically a woman. I had the medicine cupboard of sanitary pads and panty liners to prove it too.

Maybe I looked at your smiling face too long. Sometimes, I tried too because I thought that was flirting. Really, I think I came across as a little stalkery or maybe disturbed. Regardless, you never said anything about it and sometimes I even deluded myself into thinking you got the message.

“Anyway, my break’s over,” I said, standing up.

“Yeah, see you out there,” you said. You were lying on the couch as per usual. You were always on the couch, lounging. I hate lazy people, I really do. I can be lazy but I hate it when other people are lazy. Does that make sense? But, with you, I never hated your laziness. To me, it was endearing. You were like a little boy on his summer holidays. Days that stretched onto more days of absolute freedom. School was just a dot in the distance. Kilometers away, never coming any closer.

Never coming any closer. No, you were going even further away from me. Never to come any closer.

I walked out of the break room. I pretended that you watched me from the couch, eyes on the back of my head, my shoulders, maybe lower if I was lucky... I pretended you thought about me. It didn’t need to be romantic. Just the idea that you maybe gave me a second thought, maybe wondered if I was working the same shift as you. That was enough to get me through my twentieth year. And in my twenty-first, I lost you.

*

In my twenty-first year, I finally got the scrotal sacks to leave med school. I’d been thinking about it for a few months by then and, if I was being honest, since I’d been accepted to med school. I took six months off tertiary education and spent most of it working. It wasn’t the same without you and I spent almost every one of those days imagining you lounging on the break room couch. I pretended you were still there and it made everything, my indecision in myself, my choices, my future, alright if only for a few moments of synthetic images.

In my twenty-fourth year, I finally graduated from uni. Not in the degree that I started with but with a degree that I liked. It had been two and a half years since I’d last worked in the store, our store. The place we’d met and the last place I’d seen you. I hadn’t heard from you in all that time.

On a Wednesday afternoon, about two weeks after I’d graduated and two months until I’d get a call-in for an interview for my first adult job, I walked home from the shops, a bag of bread in one hand and a carton of apple cider in the other. The only alcoholic drink I could tolerate. It was almost 7pm but the sun was still in the sky. It was an Australian summer; the days here are so long like you can’t get rid of them.

It was in my twenty-fourth year that I finally saw you again. At first, I didn’t think it could be you. But it was the same head of unruly black hair, the same lopey, slopey walk. The same dopey shirts that never fit you quite right. I’d been in love with guys since I’d fallen in love with you and they always wore perfectly fitted shirts that hinted at gym workouts underneath. But nothing could compare to the shirts you used to wear that hinted at a summertime barbecue underneath. You were everything I swore I would never want in my adolescent days and yet I’d been perfectly and honestly enraptured by you.

“Ryan!” I said. It was definitely you. You’d turned around, on your phone. For most of the time I’d known you, you’d had a really crappy, old phone despite being a tech guy at work. It was only a few weeks before you left that you’d upgraded. That was you though, wasn’t it? You were ironic without trying. You were perfect while being imperfect.

“Yeah?” you said. You looked up and I was too happy to feel self-conscious about what I was wearing, what my hair was doing, what my skin was doing, what I was doing.

“Hey!” I said. I walked towards you like I was being pulled in with a rope.

You looked almost the same. You’d lost a little weight, all that tofu surely. And your skin was devoid of most of the acne you’d suffered through in your early twenties. But you were still essentially the same. And hell, so was I.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked. A grin lit up my face. I was floating on clouds, I was so gone by then. I was on ecstasy. E, e, e, e, e, e, eeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

“You look so familiar,” you said. You squinted your eyes, thinking deeply. “How do I know you?”
“Top Office,” I said. I didn’t want to delay it any longer. I wanted to see the acknowledgement in your eyes, I wanted to hear you say my name.

“Top Office?” he said. “Wow, that’s so long ago… Sally?”

“Yes!” I said. It was a cheer, a wallop to the back of the team’s star player, a whoop, an orgasmic cry into the night.

God, I was so done for. I was so done for the second I clamped eyes on you. The first time I saw you, I thought you were absolutely weird. You were so sloppy, quiet but outgoing. These were things I’d quickly grow to admire and love about you.

“Sally!” you said. You were never scared to show enthusiasm, the opposite of which was a fault of mine. “How are you?” you asked.

“I’m great! How are you? God, it’s been so freaking long,” I said. My heart was racing. I was 19 and 20 again. I was 19 and 20 at the same time. But I was 23 but I was 19 but I was 20.

“I know!” you said. All exclamation marks. Every sentence. “You must’ve graduated uni by now?”

“I just graduated,” I said. “What about you? When did you get back from Japan?”
“Wow,” he said, thinking. Thinking face. You were thinking. What I wouldn’t give to go into that brain and see what you were thinking. “About a year and a half now? Then I spent a few months in Finland with my brother. I’m back visiting my parents then I’m going to aviation school in Denmark for a couple of years. I’ve already down a semester online with the school.”

Just like that, I felt my heart sink down and out of the soles of my feet.

“Denmark? Wow.”

“I know. I can’t wait,” you said. Your smile wasn’t enough this time to distract me. Your eyes were the brownest of brown. Dirt brown, poo brown. Brown brown. I lost myself in the excrement.

“That’s so cool. I didn’t know you wanted to be a pilot?”

“Yeah, I kind of was thinking about it for a few years before Japan. Or I wanted to get into photography but I figured piloting would be more… international.”

I laughed. Out loud. Very obnoxiously and too loudly for what the situation called for. You didn’t care and laughed with me. We stood there, two people laughing way too loudly for the situation.

“Oh, my God,” I said. I wiped a tear from my eye. “We have to meet up for coffee or something. I have to hear all about Japan and Finland.”

“Sure!” you said and, my God, you actually sounded enthusiastic. It lifted me like a Wonderbra on a chilly morning.

“Do you have facebook yet?” I teased. We’d had this conversation before. You laughed as you remembered. Thank God, you remembered.

“Yes! Add me. Ryan Button. We should meet for coffee next week. I’m going up north to visit my brother in Exmouth the week after that. I won’t be able to wait until I get back to see you again!”

It felt like I’d broken in half. Did you realize what your words did to me? How you could turn me from devastated to overjoyed with simple sentences like that? Did you know what I’d felt for you at all during that year I’d been so… into you?

“I’m going to facebook stalk you so hard,” I joked. I wasn’t scared to say these things with you. Maybe when I was 19 I had been but now, I felt different. I wanted to be in control, I wanted to be an adult. “Did you end up getting a girl pregnant in Japan?”
“Not to my knowledge, no,” you said. “Let me give you my number, anyway. We can go through all the girls I could have possibly gotten pregnant in Japan and then come up with ways to skip out on child support in case I got one of them le preg.”

We exchanged phone numbers and, my God, you had the same phone as the one you’d left for Japan with. No, not the super old flip phone (hinges. Those phones had hinges) but the one you’d upgraded to just before you’d left. It had been new and state of the art then. Now, it was so old. It was so you.

“By the way,” you said as the interaction came to a close, “I never thought I’d get the chance to say this to you but I figure I should do it now before it’s too late.” I’d gone through enough tea breaks with you to never get my hopes up at such leading statements anymore. You were always prone to grand introductory speeches with main paragraphs that left you feeling a little flaccid.

“Yeah?”

“I kind of liked you when we were working at Top Office. Like, I liked you quite a bit.”
“Really?” I said, feigning surprise. “You never said anything.”

“I guess I didn’t want to make things awkward,” you said. For once, you almost seemed shy.

“That’s kind of funny,” I said. My heart, my hips, my feet, my head lurched forward. I was an adult, a woman, a university graduate. I was moving out in three months. I’d be married in two more years. I was no longer a 20 year old virgin; I was a 24 year old sex god.

“Because I kind of liked you back then too. In fact,” I said, and this is when things got very dramatic and just like how 19 year old me would have wanted it. “I still kind of like you. Quite a bit.”

 J