Everlong
One thing that, looking back, I didn’t experience, was having a boyfriend. I was friends with lots of different groups of people, but somehow, it seemed, that no boys were interested in me. I figured it was my slovenly behavior and my 5’2” frame. Short girls, in my opinion, were probably not interesting. Short, drunk girls were less so.
I’ve not had good luck with men. I was married twice, but both were bad decisions made with alcohol on board. I tried my best to make the marriages work, but they didn’t. My second marriage lasted way too long, but I tried to make it work because I chose that road and tried to steer into it with some semblance of sanity.
A while back, in my new life here in Connecticut, something amazing happened.
Now that I’m in my old stomping grounds surrounded by the familiar and many life-long friends, I happened to run into a boy I knew a long time ago, and we began to talk. He is now a married man, happy, and still one of my favorite people in the world. We were friends, (are friends), and have been since I was 14 years old. He told me that he had always had a big crush on me, and that if he had been braver as a kid, he might have had the guts to tell me that he was madly in love with me and that he thought we’d have been the perfect couple.
I was flabbergasted as I, too, had had a mad crush on him, but never told him, for fear of ruining the dynamic of our friendship. As I processed this confession of his, I was overwhelmed by his brave nature as a grown man, and wished I’d also been brave enough to tell him that I liked him way back then. A few days later, we talked on the phone, and I made the same confession to him. We talked and laughed about what might have been back then. I told him that I’d have ruined anything we might have had together in those days because I ruined everything with my horrendous drinking habits and that I had accomplished doing nothing in my youth except ruining my future through that booze haze that I had surrounding me. He told me that his liking me was “Never predicated on whether (I) ever drank or not." Wow.
What a guy. Really.
To understand the gift this friend of mine gave me, you would have to understand that my self-esteem was non-existent back then, and that I saw myself as basically a good-for-nothing during my entire high school experience. What amazed me was that all I had believed about myself, even now, into my late 50s, was that I was virtually unlikeable. That everyone saw me on the outside as I saw myself on the inside. Just not worthy of anything but doing shots at the bar.
This boy/man changed years of beliefs that I had built up in my mind about Maureen the teen. He gave me a huge gift; he made me see myself, for once, as a “normal” girl. It literally changed the trajectory of my life in that one moment. The most beautiful thing he said when our conversation was ending? "You will always be the girl I should have spent my life with." You can't make this romantic stuff up, unless, possibly, you are Nora or Delia Epheron and have a movie contract.
I am thinking that back then, we weren’t meant to be anything to each other but good friends and unrequited loves. The universe has its own plan, and we weren’t meant to be a couple in it. I told him that I knew, if he dated me as that drinking girl, that I’d have ruined everything, and we wouldn’t be friends today as a result, so it was probably a good thing we never got together. But it is one of those “What-ifs” that one can only wonder about because we will never truly know what might have happened if things had been different.(Heck, things would have been different if I had been 5'5" tall instead of 5'2" tall; I'm sure of it!)
Why did my friend confess this to me?
Because he had lost a family member close to him, and had decided that given a chance, he would no longer leave things unsaid in the future, as life is too short. He wanted no regrets.He had no expectation of my reciprocating his feelings. Wasn't he surprised!
I think my friend is a brilliant, kind, and loving man, and I’m so lucky that he was brave enough to tell me his secret. It truly changed the way I felt about my own life; my perception of myself changed when I saw the teen me through his eyes. He loved me, and I loved him, and we get to be friends, real, true friends, for the rest of our lives. How beautiful is that?
To have had cancer – to have wondered how long it might take for a disease to suck the life out of me – made me look closely at my life. Things that seemed so important suddenly were not; priorities changed. “Things” don’t matter much anymore, but feelings do. Telling people that they matter to you takes on new meaning. It’s as if you have to use every last breath that you are given to make sure that what you leave on this planet when you actually leave this planet means something. It becomes a passion to be passionate about those kinds of things that really, truly matter.
To my friend, who I will always truly love, I love you for this. Had I been a sober girl, we might have been like Luke and Laura on General Hospital, (only minus the choreographed rape scene and the Elizabeth Taylor Cassodine Ice Princess story line). But we would have been each other’s true love; I’m sure of it. What I say to him now, and I mean with all my heart, is that I thank him, for thinking I was someone who was worth loving back then. He believed in me when I did not, and we secretly loved each other from afar. What I know now is that the best relationships start out as friendships, and I am so lucky to have the great friends that I do in my life; I’ve been truly blessed. The only mark I want to make on the world while I’m here is to be the kind of person that people will have been happy to know; a person who brought a smile to their face at least once. That's what I'd want people to remember.
For my friend, who shall remain nameless, I thank you for this gift, and the gift of your friendship, and I ask that if you are ever single again, that we pursue a relationship other than friends. In the meantime, I’ll stick to sappy movies, and reruns of General Hospital, and hope that I find my Prince Charming somewhere, since your dance card is full. You're a tough act to follow, so there are big shoes to fill.
Any takers?
Love large, people. Love large. Life is short (and so am I).
GREAT things come in small packages.
Cheers.
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