Open letter to a long lost friend

Yesterday, my colleague Angie and I rushed to the bathroom after returning from lunch.  We were headed into a 2 hour meeting at an unfamiliar site and had just returned from a spicy thai lunch with lots and lots of water followed by a trip to Starbucks.  Something had to give and it had to give fast.

As I chose my stall, I noticed that both the toilets I passed had their seats up.  Strange, for a ladies’ room, no?  I wondered if in our rush we had both wandered into the men’s room.  I was reassured when I saw the tiles on the floor were damp–a restroom cleaning crew at lunch, how indulgent!

Angie called to me over the stall, “We did hit the right bathroom, didn’t we?”  I laughed and told her I had just been thinking the same thing.

As I peed, my thoughts wandered back to a long forgotten date I had with you to a formal my sophomore year in college.  I was frustrated by the lines at the ladies room, and you offered to take me into the men’s room of the moderately swanky hotel where the event was held.  This might have been socially unremarkable had our group been the only one using the 4 banquet halls in the hotel.  However, there were two weddings and another formal going on and we had to share bathrooms.  My visit to the men’s room did not go unnoticed.     

Undaunted, you blocked for me, bringing me past scores of men in the cavernous bathroom.  All the men were lined up at the urinals.  I hadn’t considered that they would be out and exposed and staring at me, some angrily.  I had committed though, and I wasn’t going to chicken out.  I averted my eyes and picked a toilet with a door still attached.  Naturally, the seat was down and someone had sprayed it down liberally.  Having never had a penis, I’m constantly amazed by this phenomenon.  Is it that hard to hit the target?  And why keep the seat down?

I gingerly squatted and did my business and got the hell out of there.  I didn’t have the nerve to wash my hands in the men’s room, so I followed you out and cut past the women waiting in the proper line and washed up there.  After I returned, you were chatting with a security guard and my heart fell.  Had you gotten in a fight?  You had  almost gotten in a fight over dinner when my friend’s date made a snide comment to you about Davidson no longer having a “real” football team. 

You finished your drink, nodded and smiled at the security guard, you both looked my way.  Then you smiled and laughed, shook the guard’s hand, and came back over to me.   No fight.  I was so relieved.

“You’re gonna have to use the ladies room from now on, kiddo.  They’ll arrest you if you don’t.”  I couldn’t argue with that.  The rest of the evening progressed in an unremarkable fashion. 

I had a huge crush on you leading up to that evening of our first and only date.  You always blew me off, saying I was “too good” and that I had better “watch out.”  You were a self-proclaimed mean drunk and womanizer, but there was something about you that I found enchanting.  You were one of the sharpest minds I’ve come across, and  I saw a gentle humility underneath your alpha male bravado.  As best as I could tell, you didn’t want a girlfriend, and even a friends with benefits situation that I would have jumped at wouldn’t have worked for you.  Your social life was completely binary: friends and one night stands.  If we had met drunk at a frat party, you might have slept with me, but I would have missed the chance to become  your friend.

Back to yesterday, I arrived home to my husband teasing me:  the mailman had brought an alumni magazine addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Husband’s First Husband’s Last.  I am SO not Mrs. My Husband.  My Husband didn’t go to Davidson, so why does his name even have to be on the damned thing?  I ranted on about how Davidson wasn’t getting a red cent from me until they address me by a name I recognize as my own.   Like they really care about the paltry check I write them when I don’t forget. 

Then I started flipping through.  I started in the back with the obituaries, which only underlines the fact that I am getting old.  There was your name staring back at me.  My heart sank, my eyes teared up.  I don’t even remember the last time I saw you.  Aside from yesterday’s random memory flash, I don’t remember the last time I thought about you.  You’re dead, you’ve been dead for almost 6 months, and when you died, you were no more than an hour’s drive from where I sit typing right now. 

I remember you shushing me one night while a few of us were sitting around, goofing off, drinking beers.  I was talking and you couldn’t hear the music: “Fire and Rain.”  I gave you some shit for that–it was somewhat anachronistic, big, gruff Chad the football player wanting to chill out and listen to James Taylor. 

“You’ve never lost a friend, have you kiddo?”  You spoke these words sharply, and a silence fell upon the room.  Ashamed, and assuming a drunken Friday night wasn’t the place to ask you about the friend you had lost, I didn’t follow up on that conversation. 

I’ve lost many friends to distance over the years, but I’ve never lost any to death until now.  It sounds lame, but even though it’s been over a decade since we parted ways, I always thought that I’d see you again.  

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