A Chain of Broken Events (Part 1 of 4)

When I was a freshman at Vanderbilt, I spent a lot of time in one of the huge common rooms on the first floor of my dorm. They called it the "formal lounge," which I suppose only now do I find odd, since there was really nothing formal about it at all. Just a gigantic, carpeted room filled with generic, stain-resistant couches and chairs upholstered in non-aggressive colors like magenta and grey…and light blue. They had a strange sheen to them that could only be described as a few steps away from plastic. Almost all of the freshman lived in a group of buildings, girls on one side, guys on the other. After all, it was a proper Southern school. And the formal lounge is what connected them all together. So on a given night, if you hung out downstairs long enough, you could bump into almost anyone. People came down to study alone or in groups, or to grab a late-night snack at the Munchie Mart. People came down in their pajamas and bedtime slippers. It was that kind of lounge. There was a grand piano in one of the rooms, and sometimes when it was really late at night, I would sit down and play something I wrote or some lounge music. Or just improvise for a while. There were always people around. And I guess that's how I met her.

I was a beltway boy still getting my bearings in the land of chicken-fried steaks and homemade grits. She was from a town on the outskirts of Atlanta which, at that time, was considered "deep south" to me. I suppose when I think about it, almost anything south of Virginia was. I don't ever remember us having any classes together -- she was a biology major, and I was a psychology/poly sci/econ kind of guy. I spent all of my time in the social sciences buildings. She was always in a lab or class on the other side of campus. But for some reason, we both seemed to end up somewhere in the middle, studying downstairs in the formal lounge amidst the sofa chairs and old oak tables.

The first thing I noticed was how easily we talked. She had a comeback for everything I said, and our conversations would roll so quickly and effortlessly, it felt like an Aaron Sorkin television show. I teased her about fried okra (or for that matter, "fried [insert anything here]"). She talked about the "War of Northern Aggression" like it happened yesterday, and called me an “honorary Northerner” (which was a backhanded compliment if I ever heard one). She had a great sense of humor, and it wasn't long before we began spending time together. We skipped classes together. We pulled all-nighters talking. One night, we talked for 16 hours straight. I just never seemed to run out of things to say. And she never ran out of questions. Rumors abounded about the state of our friendship, but we didn't care. We were having fun. And we were freshman in college. And wasn’t that the point, anyway?

One night in the spring, a bunch of people went over to a friend’s house to watch some movies. I don't remember what movie was showing at the time, but I guess now that I think about it, it didn't really matter all that much to me. I remember that it was a large room, and people were sprawled out all over the floor. People had brought sleeping bags, I guess to stay the night. The first part of the night is hazy – like a dream. It was halfway through the first movie when she nudged me.

"Do you want to take a walk?"

"Now?"

"Yah."

"Um...sure..."

“I know the perfect place.”

And so we left the house and took a walk. A slow walk. The kind of walk where it didn't really matter where we went. At some point, we ended up at a place called "Dragon Park" (nicknamed that because it had huge dragon sculptures coming out of the ground). I remember thinking how quiet it was. No breeze. Nothing at all. And so we stopped and hopped on some nearby swings. And when she grabbed my hand, it felt as if we were kids again, running around the playground and playing hide and seek among the dreaming trees.

But then something strange and unexplainable happened. I realized where this night was headed. We were in the same book, but on completely different pages. I was somewhere in the first chapter, but she was already at the end. And at that moment, everything changed. She looked different. She looked down a lot when we were talking now. She stopped looking me in the eye. We kept talking, but the tenor of her voice was changing. It was tender. Intimate. We both didn’t want this evening to end, but for very different reasons.

So we continued to swing for a while, pretending a giant elephant hadn’t walked into the room and wedged itself right between us. We took our time walking the country mile to my dorm room, which was empty. This was different from the formal lounge. And I noticed it immediately. We just continued to talk, laying on the bed and looking up at the ceiling. Or at the opposite wall, covered with posters of U2 and Michael Jordan. We looked around. Just not at each other. We said things, but our conversations became tired and labored under the weight of unrequited feelings and expectations.

I'm not sure what happened next. But for whatever reason, I left. Not physically, but emotionally. I checked out. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to have the conversation. Not yet. Maybe, not ever. Maybe I was on overload. Whatever the reason, our conversations ground to a halt. And in the midst of the hours of silence, I heard her.

"So…do you think we have a chance?"

“Chance?” I said as if I hadn’t understood the question.

“Yah. You and me.”

I paused for a long time. I wanted to get this right. I wanted to say the words I was looking for in exactly the right way.

"I…I don't know."

I was stunned. The words escaped before I could close my mouth. And for the first time in our brief friendship, neither of us could say anything. The awkwardness was growing exponentially, and began to fill the room until it threatened to choke the life out of us. I desperately wanted to say something that would break the tension. Anything. A joke about southern food. Or maybe some joke about southern names like “Mary Jane” or “Jim Bob”. But my voice failed me. Our voices failed us. And somewhere in the darkness, on that quiet and still night, we broke.

When the tears stopped, she got up off the bed and left my life. We never really talked about that night, or what happened (or why for that matter). The funny thing is that I can't really remember any of our talks, but only that we did talk. And to this day, I'm not sure why I said what I said. Like many of my memories, that night was vivid in places, fuzzy in others. I remember her white, long-sleeved tee shirts that she wore, and the shoulder length brown hair she had. I tell myself that maybe I wasn’t ready. But more truthfully, it was probably that she just wasn’t the right person for me. And somewhere, deep down...inside in the inarticulate part of my soul...I knew it.

She wrote me a 20-page letter later in the summer, but I never replied. It’s not that I didn’t want to. I wrote dozens of drafts full of apologies, explanations and good intentions. But in the end, I couldn't get over the fact that I still felt the same way. And no one wants to write a letter saying that you’re sorry, but you wouldn’t have done anything different. It haunted me the entire summer after my freshman year (and for a while after that). I was bearing the crushing weight of self-imposed guilt…of feeling cruel for not being able to feel the same way she did about me. Of wanting to feel differently and of wanting to be the bandage that bound her brokenness. I eventually wrote her back the following year, but by then, the damage was done and all the apologies in the world couldn't have bridged the chasm that had formed between us. We did reconcile a bit and get closure on the issue, but it was never the same. We lost touch over the years, and eventually, she married a good southern man.

I was genuinely happy for her, but truthfully, I couldn't help but feel a little bit sad also. Though I am sure the seeds were sown long before that night, it forged the first link in a long chain of broken events. And though I don't look back on that night with regret, I do mourn the loss of a dear friend. Sometimes, I wonder why it had to be that way. Why in the affairs of the heart, it is always all or nothing. There is so much I wish I could know. But when I stare up at the vast starry sky, questions in hand, I am often troubled to hear only silence, save for the small consolation of the beating of my own heart.