Aspen

My friends and I made fun of him for being the sort of guy who "played saxophone in the rain." We lived together in a house with 12 hippies. The type of house that had the "if it's yellow let it mellow" rule applied not just to flushing, but to everything.

He had a brown paper grocery bag full of home grown weed that he gave to me because he didn't really have a use for it. So I used it to sell to Kirstie and Eric upstairs at $5 a handful.

At 10:00 one night, he came to my room and asked if I wanted to go to the beach. "Of course I do," I said. So we hopped in his little rusty hatchback and drove six hours east, until we saw water. We didn't really know where we were going, which beach. We didn't even have a map. We just knew we were in North Carolina and would eventually hit it.

We hopped out of the car and ran in the freezing wet sand and got our ankles wet in the cold salty 2 am ocean water. The sand had phosphorescent critters in it that glowed wherever our feet went. It mimicked the stars. Except we could control the movement of light.

Then we hopped back in the car and punched each other in the arms to keep awake on the drive back. Our cheeks hot from tired and flush, our shoulders freezing from wind and coldness and night and tired. Shivvering and hot inside and out. We finally got back, just in time for our 8:30 am classes.

One night, I was sitting on the steps feeling sad and melancholic about whatever stuff plagues little college kids' minds. Something about romance or a broken heart or something. Probably unfulfilled longing, since I had a crush on my housemate. Pattern behavior for me: want the unattainable. Birch listened to me cry and then he sucked in all of the courage he'd been saving up all semester to tell me, "I love you."

"I know you do," I said. "And that's really nice. But I just want someone to love me. I'm so unlovable."

The first million times I heard the word "crestfallen" it didn't mean anything to me other than a cartoon. In fact, it only really had a significant impact on me the time I heard it about seven years later and saw it played out in a cartoonish romantic comedy manner at a friends' wedding where I was the deflater of someone else's crest. But I diverge. What I mean to say here is that crestfallen is the perfect word to describe the way Birch's blinking eyes did a double-take. The set of his jaw was taken aback. He was handing me something precious, an oyster opening its shell not to reveal a pearl, but something even more precious than that: the gooey, vulnerable insides. And I looked at that and said, "ew." Shut that back up. I don't want to see that gross, mushy, living thing.

I think he said something else, too. To try to correct my mistaken misunderstanding of what he said. A cold rail road spike shot through. If I accept this, I have to commit and I don't want to because of the "what if" of all else that is out there. It will be far too permanent. I'm not ready for this. Plus, I think at the time I was trying to convince myself I was a lesbian or something. So I said, "But Birch, I don't respect you. How can I ??? If I don't respect someone...?" Because he was goofy, you see. Carefree. A guy who plays saxophone in the rain. (Which, incidentally, yes. He really did.)

Is it overkill to say that I have regretted doing this ever since? I don't know how it was that I expected things would go on and continue exactly as they had been prior to that moment, but somehow I did. And I was shocked every time I saw him and he was less than happy or cheerful or even comfortable to see me. Is it overkill to say that after I realized my mistake and tried to get him back, it was clearly, already, overwhelmingly, permanently, way too late?