love will wash away the blues

[rachelleneveu]

On the personal blog of a girl I follow, but rarely look at, she's doing a “People I’ve Been With” meme-type-thing: trying to list as much detail from the person and/or the experience as she can. Seeing as how I’ve yet to “be with” someone, this version of the exercise has evolved into something more along the lines of “people I’ve kissed.”

They probably don’t completely count, but McBuff and McDanger are still included in this because of…reasons. Names haven’t been changed to protect the innocent, because we aren’t, are we?

Pat Kaleta: I didn’t know him for very long, or maybe I did and I just don’t remember it. Our dads worked together when I was very, very young; at a barbecue, he chased me around his backyard with a rubber gremlin toy until I cried. I have a picture of us in a shoebox somewhere from a holiday party: his aunt is holding mistletoe over our heads, and he’s basically smashing his face against my cheek so he can get away and back to the cake. I was six, he was nine. He was cute: one of those kids who even if he didn’t grow up to play sports, you knew he’d still be big and broad, very handsome. Pat plays for the Sabres now, and Jesus, that kid’s insane on the ice. I’m proud of him.

Jason Frieling: Jay was two years older than me, quiet, had brown hair. I don’t remember what color his eyes were and it makes me sad. He liked to write, and we actually exchanged letters for a little while after he and his mom and step-dad moved. It was another Christmas kiss – both of us shoved under the mistletoe by another friend before he had to go catch his ride back to Syracuse – not good, but the first one that counted. It happened a month or two before he died. I was fourteen. I don’t like thinking about it.

Andy Troutman: A senior when I was a sophomore. Brown hair, a long face, and a great dancer. He was in the musical that year and because I ran the prop room, he and I used to joke around a lot whenever he rushed backstage for costume changes and things. Opening night, he came back after the curtain went down to leave his police baton and hat with me and he had lipstick all over his face from one (or two, or maybe three, I never asked) of the other girls in the show. I tapped my finger near my mouth to let him know there was something on his face and he just kind of leaned down and kissed me. It was quick, surprising more than anything else, and he never brought it up again, so I didn’t, either. He came out to his parents that summer. He’s living in California now and has a very handsome boyfriend. Harper laughed at me for ten straight minutes when I first told her that story, not because he turned out to be gay, but because I couldn’t remember his last name at first and kept saying things like, “Andy…Fishman. Wait, Fishberg. Fish…thing. Andy Swordfish, whatever. Anyway! He…”

Dave Klein: Dave and I were the same age, even though he was a grade ahead of me. Very opinionated, he had dark hair and a nose like a beak; he wore hipster glasses and bondage pants and preppy polo shirts – he wavered a lot between preppy and goth. It should have been a clue, now that I think about it, how hard it was for him to make up his mind. We got stuck working together on a project for our photography class and we were in the darkroom after school, trying to get it done. I was loading our film into the canister and it was pitch-black in there, the water was running on the table behind me and everything smelled coppery, like developer. He kissed me out of nowhere: just sidled up next to me in the dark and squeezed my arm, like he was trying to figure out where I was, the shape of me. He missed at first, fixed his lips on my cheekbone before he figured out that he had to duck his head more to find my mouth, and it was strange; it felt like being out of my body, really, partly because of the darkness and partly because of the act itself. We made out for a little bit and after some time had passed, he pulled away and went to turn on the safelights, lighting everything up with this weird red glow while I put the chemicals into the film canister. Like with Andy, he never brought it up, so neither did I – Dave and I didn’t really get along to begin with, and to this day I don’t know who is more embarrassed by it, him or me. He came out literally a week later, had a boy on his arm two weeks after that. Last I heard he was studying theatre in Chicago. Eight years later and I still don’t know what to make of this.

Anton Balonevski: The Great Russian Dolt. Tall and sarcastic and ultimately, one of the most annoying people I’ve ever met. No idea what I was thinking at the time, and the less said about this square-headed loser, the better. He’s in the army now, has a girlfriend, and grew a questionable beard.

Chris: Miah’s best friend, the Batman to his Spiderman, we met in our freshman year of high school. Funny and charming, he was blond and fast and tall, a swimmer, a runner. He was the first of our social circle who could really drive and he’d always let me ride shotgun over our other friends, over Harper, even over Miah. He’d always try to scare me by driving with his knees; he kidnapped me once in junior year, when I was having a terrible day and was walking to the library, he took me to Dash’s and bought me an iced tea. He used to throw candy and pretzels and pennies at me, trying to get them down my shirt and in the space between my boobs. I helped him buy Christmas presents for his girlfriends, he gave me the pin from his championship swim meet in 12^th grade. I wore it on the lapel of my winter coat for years. He worked at Clearfield Liquor until they shut down and bought me a bottle of pomegranate schnapps for my birthday. I always do a double-take whenever I see silver convertibles, thinking it’s him, even though I know he has a different car now and moved to Detroit last year for his new job. We don’t talk at all, anymore, for a lot of different reasons. I miss him.

Miah: My future forest ranger, my closest male friend. We went to the same elementary school but didn’t meet until we were high school freshmen. He was a skinny, gangly nerd-boy with Brillo-pad hair and a running itch and I was a short, squishy drama geek who went through the entire summer reading list for fun. We met at a mixer event for freshman during our first homecoming week, where they’d give you a plastic colored lei and force you to sit at the corresponding lunch table. It was an awkward start, but we somehow hit it off and have built up a fantastic repertoire of inside jokes over the years since. At a homecoming dance sophomore year, we were too close to the boat/bonfire during the fireworks show and were nearly hit by a lot of broken shells. He exploits how ticklish I am on a regular basis and hits on my sister and has terrible taste in music, beer, and pickup lines. We both wound up going to NCCC after high school and when his car broke down a month into our first semester there, he’d catch rides with me to and from school. We worked at the Wilson Farms together for three years and I used to go visit him on my nights off. I talked him through his breakup with his first major girlfriend, Anya. He sucks at communicating while he’s away at school and I continually lend him books that he literally takes a year to read and I no longer have house privileges at his parents’ place because the summer before last, Miah held a bonfire where he tickled me so much and I laughed so loud that the next morning his dad flat-out asked him if we were having sex in the backyard. He’s been my fake boyfriend more times than I can count, and I’m sure there’s still a bunch of people out there who think we’re actually dating, or at least have at some point. They’re wrong, but it’s still funny. Because he’s a freak he somehow still fits into his “graduation” t-shirt we all signed in the fourth grade and even though we’d never met at that point, we both somehow signed our names right next to each other on the big ’99 printed on the back. Fate, I’m telling you.

Bill Hake: Black hair, blue eyes, wicked sense of humor. Looked a little bit like Chris Evans if he turned his head the right way. Had a tattoo of the Batman symbol on his left forearm, played guitar in a band he never told me the name of. We were in two classes together at NCCC: World Civilizations I and Creative Writing. We went out twice, went downtown and had a good time – at least, I thought so. My hair was really long then, and he played with it when he kissed me. The third time we met at a Starbucks and he told me that while I was a “nice distraction,” he and his girlfriend were working out the problems they had and he couldn’t see me anymore. I was upset, probably more than I should have been, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t have any classes with him after that, and only saw him once or twice around campus before I graduated and went to Buff State. I got the urge to look him up on Facebook a month or so ago and he and that girlfriend are engaged, now. Good for them.

Mike: At least, I think his name was Mike. I don’t know, I was pretty buzzed. I am also fairly sure I told him my name was Jane, and that I was a culinary student from Canada, so. Yeah. He was tall, with dark hair and big hands and this weird goatee thing going on, but a very unkempt one. We danced for a little bit, he looked better in the dark. It wasn’t a good kiss – the only reason I did it was because it was last call and to my inebriated brain, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I got up on my tiptoes and kissed him quick, and then he took me by my shoulders when I tried to leave and kissed me harder, like he meant it. It was itchy. He needed a shave. He tried to give me his number before my friends and I left. I passed.

I don’t know how to feel after listing this. A little detached, honestly, surprised at how clinical it sounds listing it out like this, how much I remember about people I honestly haven’t seen or thought about in years, that there's actually a bit of a pattern in what kind of men I'm attracted to. Sad, too, in some ways, because this is what I have to show for 23 years of a quasi-romantically-active life: some winners, some losers, a dead boy, and McBuff. I feel like there’s something missing in me that this is what I have – that I skipped a step somewhere along the line, went down a road I shouldn’t have. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll come to me tomorrow, after I’ve gotten some sleep.