youth

03 \\ home runs

"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase." - John Green, Looking for Alaska (2005)

                                                               ✧  ✧ ✧

Stages in a relationship are generally known but they are also exclusive to the couple going through them. I mean there’s more than one scale but the general outline of a relationship is known universally. One scale you could look at is the home run scale – first base, second base, third base, home run. Frenchy, feely, finger, fuck as some people more bluntly put it, like you. Another is just the system; meeting, going on dates, asking him or her out etc. it’s just how it goes. But still those stages are individual to the people involved and are all spattered with memories of reaching these levels and passing or not passing them.

Our stages are something sketched into my memory, the edges slightly smudged. It’s safe to say we didn’t really start dating until more than a year had passed. We ‘went out’ a few times but whenever I actually mentioned the word ‘date’ you would laugh and say dating would take away the vogue of things. I think that’s the faintest sketch – our first date. I can remember it but the words seem almost censored at times. The sounds of the city haranguing us, the smell of books lingering on you, the sight of your lips - ethereal in red – as you formed meticulous sentences… but not the words.

They’re there of course, like a kite I can see flying but not one I could catch. I don’t mind though. Having memories, like the one of you standing by the bus stop as the rain pelted down, choosing not to use its shelter, is enough for me. I doubt you could remember anything I said on our first genuine date either, my words have never been more than insignificant and compared to yours they were trivially mundane. But maybe, like the way you can remember all the lyrics to a song after just one listen of it, you can remember the words I spoke. Maybe you can remember more than just my laughter – which will never be as lyrical as yours – and the way I sat or smiled or ran or walked or talked or cried or laughed or jumped or skipped or wrote or read or listened to music. All the things I can remember about you; well a selection of them.

Whatever our dates were they were always juvenile and after a while I came to agree with your way of thinking; they were just a shit contemporary concept. It was the unplanned meetings and evenings out that I always enjoyed the most. They were the sort of meetings were you hit second base but you enjoy for a whole different reason. We were good at hitting bases, you and I. Perhaps a little slow to get there but that was only because of my hesitance. You on the other hand neither pushed towards it nor pulled away. I don’t think you would ever pull away.

Sometimes I thought you were doing it to prove something, to yourself and everyone else, but other times I could actually see more than lust dancing on your face. I didn’t mind though. The fact that you could lust after me was more than enough. Shallow as that maybe it was how I felt at the time. How I still feel. How you felt I will never know because, no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to properly enter that world inside your head. I could pass the border after a while but the snatches of countryside I saw would never be the metropolis in the distance. My passport would never suffice to get me there; only you would ever be allowed there. I do know though that hitting home runs was something not unusual for you. You’d passed that stage in many relationships before. I never really wanted to know about it but sometimes in relationship you reach a stage where it becomes necessary to take the cover off your sins. Of course you wouldn’t ask for forgiveness but we reached that stage eventually.

We didn’t reach the stage in our relationship, though, where I had to reveal all of my sins. You never asked and I knew you just assumed my first home run was with you. I didn’t say anything to move your mind from this and I guess this is where I have a one-up on you; because you weren’t my first. Maybe I shouldn’t be so proud of this but that inglorious feeling still reigns whenever I think of this. If I had told you, would you have thought any better of me? If I had told you I wasn’t a virgin when we got together, what would you have said? I don’t really want to find out but that doesn’t mean the curiosity isn’t there. I have a feeling you might hate me for it. 

That was the most carnal stage of our relationship; the sex. I think the romantic stage was when you wore only one of my t-shirts, some knickers and a pair of knee-high socks and I hugged you from behind and you would smile and tell me that you loved me. A stage that came on days spread across our timeline; scattered like the freckles on your shoulder blades.

Sometimes I forget the stages and they blur into a mix tape of everything. It looks like something John Hughes would have directed. But would he have wanted to direct something that was so full of mistakes that sometimes they outweighed the laughs? Would he have wanted to direct something that was so full of happy feelings always tainted by sadness? Would he want to direct something so scintillating that it seems too perfect to be flawed? I don’t think he would. You see, when you try to capture the life of someone you will always fail. Because there will always be something you miss; some abstract definition of that person that only their lovers can see.