John

It's funny that I want all of them. I want a garden of boys and men to cultivate and grow. Perhaps I should have married young and had five sons and lived in a household of men. I want to talk to them in the morning while I pluck their dying leaves and encourage the buds. I want to sit in the evenings and admire them until after the sun goes down. I think I have never been with a man I haven't been in love with on some level, who I haven't wanted to keep forever.

I don't remember meeting John for the first time. Johnny we called him then. I remember sitting in Renee's dorm room and looking through her pictures from home and coming across one of him and saying, "Who. Is. That." He was her friend from home who went to NYU. NYU, I thought. Too good for me. But so very beautiful to look at. I'd pick up the album every time I was in her room and flip to that page and just look and sigh. But I don't remember meeting him. I remember she told me he was coming for a visit and I remember getting nervous and picking the right clothes and probably getting very high to calm my panicked shyness. But I don't remember the moment we met. I remember the first time we sat in the backyard together, and he pointed out that we were both wearing torn jeans and tie-dyed shirts. And thinking oh goodness he's not too good for me, he's just a dork like me. Maybe worse than me. And then I remember for how very long we were in love.

It was a comfortable, strange sort of love. We stayed constantly by each other's side but I was guarded. He was my best friend and sometimes we kissed or made out, but I felt always annoyed by him. He wore his heart on his sleeve. I wished he wouldn't do that. Everytime I got hurt by another boy I'd run back into his arms and I was comforted to have him, but annoyed that he would have me back so easily. I thought the love was too easy to be real. So I scorned it. Always he was in love with me. I always knew he was there. And so always I kicked dirt in his eyes for loving me and beat him down for being there. I didn't know then that I was so very afraid.

When he decided he was going to move out West we got in a fight about it. A very theoretical argument. He said he didn't love New Jersey because the people weren't as open as he thought people should be. And I said if you don't find love in a place you should put love into that place and make it beautiful, not run away to some imagined garden of milk and honey. Two days later I went down to Philly to see him play, and one of his new songs sounded so familiar to me. But why should it be so familiar? He's never played it before. Then he wailed out, "oh girl I'm going away for a while," and I knew then it was familiar because it was the very argument we'd just had. He was singing to me why he had to leave.

After he'd been in New Mexico for a while I flew out to visit, not him, specifically. My brother had moved there with him, along with a handful of our friends. All the boys. They lived in a pack then, as we girls did. One did nothing without the rest of them. I slept on their sofa in Santa Fe and got annoyed at the way he smoked all the pot and ate all the food and wouldn't put in his fair share for anything. I was annoyed at the popping sound his lips made when he dragged his cigarette, the smacking noises when he chewed. I was annoyed at the mess he left in his wake as he moved through the house. I wasn't in love with him then.

We went for a drive one day, just he and I, for hours down a dirt road through a desert. We were looking for a fabled place he'd heard of called Two Peaks, or Three Peaks maybe, where he could trade some crystals he'd found to some jewelry-making commune hippies for Really Good Weed. We never found it. I thought maybe it was a metaphor for our relationship, a long winding search for a place that didn't exist. We passed over the bridge outside Taos where Quentin Tarantino filmed the wedding scene in Natural Born Killers. I was sad that I didn't want to stop the car and marry him.

Then later he moved on to San Francisco. He fell in love with a 22-year-old lesbian. He was moving out to marry her. And I was so angry. By then it had been a good eight or so years that I'd known him, and I shouldn't have been so surprised that he'd do something so romantic and rash. I didn't know then that I was angry he'd finally fallen in love with someone else. They never got married, John and the young lesbian. They've since broken up and though I thought he'd move home after that happened, he didn't.

And now it's been so many years since I've seen him, and he's moving on again, this time to Portland, Oregon. I'm hoping to visit him in August and I wonder how it will be. Old friendships never die, and I know it'll be just like that, just like yesterday when I see him again. And I'll cringe when he pops his lips on his cigarette, and I'll feel warm and frustrated when he hugs me and tells me it's good to see me. And I'll wonder as I always do how things could have been different between us, if only this or if only that. And I'll blame myself for not being capable of love and we'll laugh and we'll talk about the old days and we'll talk about how beautiful life is now that we're old. I'll leave with a sad smile and tell him I'll see him when comes home for my brother's wedding in the fall. And I'll drive off missing him still. As I always have.