Back on the Carousel

1 - A Story

Spinning around and around,
Lights everywhere,
Music so fast and wild,
Brass rings unreachable,
Look up.

I knew that I fell in love too deeply, and too quickly to risk it, yet I did it anyway. I was tired of being weighed down by my baggage, tired of denying myself. But mostly, it was the story; I fell in love with a story.

When we first met I thought that you were someone else. I was alone in a room choked with people, speechless in a sea of excited, sleepy voices nervously celebrating the adolescence we were leaving behind. (We were in High School, now, after all. Certainly that meant we were adults, certainly that meant we had a clue.)

It was the backpack that made me think you were him, the boy with the name that rolls over the edge of my recollections. I remember your backpack more than I remember him, it was tan canvas, an over-the shoulder-bag with little metal pins. (How trendy, I think now.) If I close my eyes I can almost see them, and their exact placements on the bag. The words and markings are blurry, as if I'm seeing them through a smoke-distorted glass lens.

Your face, though, when you turned to me, after setting your bag on top of your desk as you so often did, is far from blurry. I can see every detail of your face. I was so surprised that day, when it wasn't him... that boy who's name I can barely remember. (The fear had been in me for it.) I was relieved. Summer-washed memories faded with the passing days.

The seat between us was empty, and I sat two seats behind you. That seat between us was a vast desert, inhabited only by crude graphite graffiti, scarred by the handiwork of a pair of scissors wielded by a bored, unscholastic scholar. An impassible barrier shorter than an arm's span.

You sat next to a boy of many faces, an echo that I would encounter again and again. Coarse, crude, with obvious goals shared in too much detail -- boundaries like emperor's clothing, nothing there that imagination did not supply-- but you didn't share in that, though you would sometimes laugh. And the two of you talked about so many things that I can't now remember as I sat, separated by that immense gulf of a desk, catching snatches of conversation and watching as you brushed dark brown hair out of your eyes. I knew then that I was in trouble... but I thought that I could sit there, forever-separated, and never have to worry about it. There was some safety in that, but naturally I worried anyway.

I watched.

And I waited, without knowing that I was waiting.

And one day it happened. I don't remember how. But one day, after enough allowed intrusions, I was invited, and the barrier fell away. And there you were, right in front of me, and I was always right behind you. We were only there for a half hour's time every morning, but that was enough. At least, it was enough for me.

And I came to believe that it was enough for you as well.

It has been years... and I am still not sure, after everything, if I was ever right...