Variations on Death - 3. Old Friend

There was always the risk of a chance meeting, as I knew when I strolled down Queen Street in my hometown for the first time in decades. From my research, I knew he lived there now, which was wise because it was also close to where he worked. I had seen his photograph and thought he looked pretty much the same as he did back then. When I saw him bolting down the street on a bicycle, I could not believe my luck, but was not sure whether my luck was good or bad. I turned to face him. After a moment's hesitation in which I calculated the most natural and innocent reaction, I waved. Did he see me? He passed on by, oblivious or else ignoring me. He had ignored me often enough times in the past. I doubt whether he wanted to meet anyone, anyway. People meant needless delays, talking, and he had been anything but a time-waster. Now was his allocated time for a cardiovascular work-out, and his eyes were trained upon the street ahead, nothing else. He had always been one to focus on the task at hand and ignore all distractions, human or otherwise. One of his reviews as an adjunct faculty at the local university described him as boring.

A long time ago, in middle school, we had been best friends, to the extent where we would talk over the phone for hours until one ear grew red, and then shift the phone over to the other ear until it, too, grew red, and just keeping on talking until either our voices grew hoarse or someone else needed to use the line. We stayed over at each other's house so often that spending even a single weekend apart, due to the whims of our parents, was thought a hardship. I grew familiar with his house and later on, his apartment, and remember the layouts of both even today. At school, we were so inseparable that the assistant principal reprimanded us for spending so much time alone together during recess. He said it wasn't healthy. We were abnormal, he said. We should play sports with the other boys. I scoffed, but my friend listened, because he heeded authority. That was the main difference between us.

Later, the schoolyard tough asked each of us, in a whisper, whether we were lovers, although he used cruder terms. We were not. I did not then understand such things. My dear friend was opposed on religious grounds or whatever it was that made him recoil from unnecessary touching, although wrestling or horseplay was okay, because it could be painful, and pain was okay, just not pleasure. His mother, she too was concerned and never liked me, although I doubt she liked many of his friends. She had no friends and no men in her life besides her son and Jesus.

As we matured, he became aware of my homosexuality, which embarrassed him, because others were aware, too. The last time he visited my house, he was uneasy, finding fault with everything. He expressed a new interest in dating girls, though not anyone specific. After that weekend, we never met again as friends. He was as focused upon our complete break then as he was on his bicycle ride now, never deviating or looking the other way for a moment. However, I saw him a few years later with another gay boy and concluded that patterns repeat themselves.

He severed our friendship with as much delicacy as a gardener's shears upon a weed. Night after night, I wrote fevered journal entries preserving my memory of our sacred friendship, hoping against hope it might be resurrected, with much quivering of my foolish heart and countless tears. I imagined a powerful, mysterious reason we had met. Destiny or the gods above had had a hand in bringing us together. After all, every romantic story has a happy or at least a meaningful ending. I had grown up reading Jane Austen. Seldom do the young consider that one can be both passionate and also wrong. My journal entries I later destroyed, realizing after a time that he did not deserve them.

To watch him cruise past without making any acknowledgment of my existence reminded me of high school, in the bad years, when he would walk past me without saying hello. I had wished to die then. Now I felt like a ghost from the past, but that is not so bad. Ghosts have at least two advantages. They cannot be harmed and they are free to go whither they choose. I had done so years and years ago, leaving the city of my birth and moving hundreds of miles away to find a man who I loved and who loved me better than he ever did. Now I knew better than to call after him or make my presence known in any other way. I rather preferred to see and remain unseen. I was only curious, because he represented a portion of my past. One always remembers first love, is that not so? One day, if I outlive him and read of his obituary, I might remark to my husband that he was an old acquaintance from my school days, but then again, I might neglect to mention him at all.