He wasn't my Pacey, or even my Dawson, he was just a guy I fucked around with.
Well, that might be selling him short a bit.
The attraction is still pretty much a mystery to me. I mean, he was blond, and a hockey player, and he had a tattoo of a snake on his bicep, heaven help me. Not my type at all. And we were together during a time in my life when I thought looking good meant wearing my corduroy overalls. True story.
We had no pretense of friendship. We probably wouldn't have liked each other very much, if we had bothered to get to know the slightest thing about one another, but ignorance is bliss, or so they say, and my god were we blissful.
I was probably 16 or 17, and I didn't believe in dating. Well, I believed it existed, but I believed it existed only for evil. As far as I could see, it turned reasonable girls into mindless dolts, and prohibited you from ever seeing the ending to the movies you'd paid to see.
While I didn't have boyfriends, I did have lovers, though I suspect that word is a bit too gracious for some of the eager yet inexperienced fumblings that some boys called sex (it's no wonder that I quickly acquired a taste for older men). And for the most part, this worked out well for me.
Not to say that Trevor was an exception, because he wasn't. Just that our "relationship" consisted solely of sex, with an occasional pre-bed drink or snack. The only time we spent out of bed, we watched a videotape of Eddie Murphy doing stand-up...and frankly, I'm still trying to figure that one out. Luckily, we filled in the awkward silences with mind-blowing sex, practicing feats of strength, endurance, and acrobatics that still give me shivers to think about almost 10 years later. Afterward we were too tired and sated to chat, so we'd doze on our separate corners of bed, until it was time for him to drive me home. In the car, I'd turn on the radio just loud enough to make attempts at conversation a foregone impossibility.
Eventually I stopped answering his phone calls, and we parted without saying so because break-ups aren't necessary when you were never together.
Why, then, when I was admiring the crisp redness of some sweet peppers at a local veggie stand and looked up to see him, did I feel an immediate need to duck into the shop and not be seen?
Hiding wasn't necessary, in the end, because he was walking on the other side of the street, and in fact, from that distance I couldn't even be sure that it was him. Just that it sure looked like him. But why hadn't I wanted to say hello?
The closest I could come to a good guess was that since we hadn't had anything to talk about while we were fucking 10 years ago, we'd probably have even less to say to each other now. And I hate the artifice of small talk, I hate being forced to ask How've you been doing? when the truth is, in all this time, I have seldom wondered what or how he'd been doing.
I was quite happy to leave Trevor in the past.
But it got me thinking, because a friend of mine has badgered me into joining Facebook, and even after 6 months of pestering, I'm still not sure why I opened the account. Maybe there are a lot of people out there thinking about lost connections, old flames, and friends who have faded away, but I'm not one of them. For the most part, I've kept in touch with all the people I've cared about keeping in touch with. I don't believe that all friendships are meant to last the ages. I think some are designed for a specific time in your life, and trying to rekindle them later on is almost always a mistake. People change, circumstances change. If you stopped talking to a friend, whether due to falling out, or neglect, they can't have been a great friend to begin with. And as for all the forgotten acquaintances - people who shared the halls of my high school, colleagues who used the copier after me, friends of old boyfriends whom I never should have dated in the first place...well, I have very little curiosity. The past is past, and I'd like it to stay that way.
But now it seems that either Facebook will drag these people back into my present, or, even more alarmingly, they might just move into my neighbourhood and catch me feeling up my vegetables.
So what's a girl who hasn't a nostalgic bone in her body to do when the past catches up with her? Invite it back to her place for cocktails?
Wear dark glasses and stop answering to her own name?
Pull up the pegs and run?
I mean, it's not that I don't love my life. I'm proud of who I am and what I've done. I've got a few twisted stories, but I'm sure I could boil it down to a saccharine story suitable to be divulged within the hallowed halls of Horton's. I guess it's mostly that I don't want to. Sorry Trevor, I guess my horny-meathead days are over.
No comments:
Post a Comment