Unrequited love
I loved her the first time I saw her. I was a music student. Behind the music school there was an old sprawling building that was appropriately nicknamed,hthe barnh. That was where the practice rooms were. I went back there one day to find a room to make some noise in when I saw her sitting in one of the rooms with the door open. She was sitting cross-legged in a chair. She sounded good playing her flute. Her long blond hair streamed over her shoulders. She wore overalls with the top part unbuttoned so that they lay around her waist. Her flowery T-shirt revealed a voluptuous torso. She was magnificent.
I managed to say something stupid like, gsounds goodh.
She smiled and said,hOh that. Just scales. TheyLre so boring but you have to do them. Sometimes I sit up in a tree to do them but I didnLt see a tree I could climb around here.h
She was cute, friendly, and slightly quirky. I was hooked. Her name was Jodie. Jodie Griffin. What a perfectly lovely name . Jodie Griffith. It was so, so , real. No pretensions about it. It was solid and yet original. On and on my thoughts went . I was losing altitude fast.
I made no secret of my feelings for her. She didnLt seem interested at first. However, I was persistent. If I was talking to a group of people and I noticed that she was coming by , I instantly became more animated and alive. By the time she joined the group, I was the center of attention. Eventually, she started to notice me.
When I had the chance I would ask her, gJodie, is there any hope for me?h
She would laugh and say, gyou always ask me thath.
But she never answered me. It got so bad that when I would call her I would smoke some marijuana to relax so that I would be more entertaining to talk to and she would like me more. Sometimes I would get pretty stoned and she wouldnft even be home or she would be busy. Then I was stuck. Stoned and thinking about her with no her in sight. At that point I found comfort in writing. I wrote poems, stories, drew pictures, wrote more poems They were all about her and my searing desire to have her love.
Perhaps it is only in pain
that we create beauty.
The artist in torment.
The mother at childbirth.
The lover.
I put the writings in a drawer and never showed them to anyone. It never even occurred to me to do that. You wouldnLt show a bloody bandage to someone would you?
Time passed and my hopes began to fade. I did kiss her once. We were sitting in my car at her house. The moment was right and I leaned over and kissed her. She was ready to kiss me. I kissed her very carefully and delicately as if to say, ILm not interested in only your body and sex, but something much more. However I think she was disappointed with my kiss and didnft get my message. She was perhaps waiting for the other kind of kiss.
I still saw her in the halls and at school but after that I stopped pressing. Without my effort , our relations started to sag like a plant that doesnLt get enough water. Before I knew it, it was the end of the year and I was finished with school. It was time for me to move away and I moved far away from my hometown, to Boston. Of course, I still thought of her and loved her, but I knew I could never have her. I could only desire her. At the end of the following year I came back to my hometown to visit my parents. I went to walk around the university and as luck would have it, I ran into her. We talked. She was glad to see me. She invited me over to her house to have some tea. I asked her what was new and she told me that she was getting married. I did my best to conceal my pain and asked her to tell me about it. She was getting married to a trumpet player in the University. I had never liked him and now I like him even less.
gWhat was it,hNI asked gthat made you fall in love with him?h
She thought for a moment and then smiled as she remembered. gHe wrote me love poems. I think thatfs what really did it for meh
Inside a part of me was dying as I realized that the reason I never captured her love was not that I didnft love Jodie enough , or that I wasnLt good enough for her , or even that she didnft love me enough, but that I didnLt trust my love enough. I thought about that as I burned the poems one by one.
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