On Occasion

Lauren

Sometimes you have a crush, sometimes you’re in love, and sometimes you’re somewhere in between.  Emotions lie on a big spectrum, so we need words to signify these intermediary states.  My favorite of these words is pining.  Nobody uses it anymore.  The common words now are lust and infatuation, perhaps obsession, but none of these conveys the swirling, conscious-warping depression that signifies the end of a simple crush and the beginning of something much worse.

The difference between having a crush and pining for someone is that crushes are great and pining sucks.  A crush is an idle fantasy that helps to pleasantly pass the time.  But when you’re thinking about the person you like, and suddenly you’re struck by the realization that you’re not with the person — that you might never be with the person — that you’ll never feel the warmth of their hand around yours — and the gargantuan, all-consuming weight of this realization crumples your heart like an ant beneath a plummeting church organ — that’s pining.

Many women have made me dream.  Only three have made me depressed.  These were the women I pined for.

I’d like to tell you about the first one.

I didn’t have a bad childhood, but I did have a thoroughly stupid one.  I played video games instead of doing most of my homework, and my parents weren’t the sort to let that slide.  School was a series of calm plateaus pierced by harrowing stress episodes.  Every quarter I’d start off good, then push it too far in this or that class and skip more homework than I could get away with.  Grades evaporated, notes were sent home.  There were some tense moments in the Dvorkin household.

I wish I could say that my academic failures were the price of social successes, but I managed to fail on that front as well.  From fourth grade to eleventh grade, I had precisely one friend, Andy.  He and I played many video games and attended countless chess tournaments.  If I ever write an autobiography, my adolescent years will get maybe a chapter, and it’ll be a short one.  “I played video games and chess” suffices for a freakishly comprehensive summary of about a decade of my existence.

Andy was a chubby kid.  He was unpopular because he was large; I was unpopular because I was obnoxious.  We were made for each other.  But when he joined the swim team in high school, he suddenly got into shape and became very handsome.  Late in eleventh grade he caught a girl’s fancy, and luckily for him it was the kind of girl who was willing to make all the moves.  She became his girlfriend, introduced him to a broader circle of friends, and was kind enough to let me along for the ride.  Thus was I introduced to the pleasure of social circles and multiple friendships.

Eleventh grade was also the year that I finally started doing my homework and, for the first time in my life, got all A’s.  It was a damn good year.

So when you picture me at band camp the summer before eleventh grade, realize that none of this had happened yet.  I was still a kid with no social intelligence whatsoever.  I knew nothing about girls or, for that matter, people.  That’s who I was when I met Lauren.

Lauren was a fellow saxophone player.  I don’t know why she sat at our lunch table or why she stayed there.  We were a bunch of random eleventh grade dudes, and she was a freshman.  I remembered what I was like as a freshman at band camp — friendless, terrified, shy — and I was immediately impressed by Lauren’s confidence.

Her other qualities impressed me as well.  She was the slightest bit chubby, but very cute, with a rosy laugh and bright eyes.  She had a unique voice, low and comforting, that instantly made you feel she liked you and cared what you had to say.  She was energetic.  She was positive.  You couldn’t imagine her crying, or trying at something and not succeeding.  Lauren wasn’t bubbly in that vapid way some girls are, but she was carefree, buoyant, bouncy — and she had a smile for everyone.

A metric ass-ton of guys liked her.  Not that I had a clue.

Lauren and I were not friends.  We didn’t hang out.  We didn’t talk, except when thrust together by miscellaneous band activities.  But we had some non-zero quantity of contact, and that made Lauren different from all my previous crushes, whom I’d only ogled from afar.  She talked to me and seemed to enjoy it.  She said hi when she passed me in the hall — and always with a smile.  She was a tangential acquaintance, yet to the Boris who didn’t properly understand what a “friend” was or how to get one, Lauren’s immaterial gestures of kindness — delivered with her irresistible, buoyant warmth — seemed like flashes of blinding affection.

Lauren was the first girl I ever made a move on.  Simple terror had stopped me before, and would have stopped me again had simple idiocy not interfered.  For weeks, I wrestled with the decision whether to ask her out; fear, desire, and logic all waged war within me.  I believed that Lauren liked me, yet there must have existed in my mind a tiny subconscious nugget of common sense that knew, even then, that my assessment of the situation was profoundly irrational.  I nearly wore out my nerves going back and forth.

And then Lauren offered to give me a ride home from jazz band.

I thought this was a huge deal.  Today, I look back and wonder how I was able to put on pants and manage my bodily functions.  Back then, I somehow decided that Lauren’s hallway salutations and a single ride home constituted an ironclad testimonial to her undying affection.  I decided to be the big man and ask her out.

Of course, since we never actually spent any time together, creating an opportunity to ask her out was quite the enterprise.  Every word I’m writing now fills me with deep embarrassment.  Through mild stalking, I deduced that Lauren always left school through the same door.  On Tuesday, September 25, 2001 — I remember the date clearly because it was exactly two weeks after the 9/11 attacks — I packed all my stuff into my backpack before seventh period so that I wouldn’t need to visit my locker after the final bell.  As soon as the bell rang, I dashed from Government & Economics to Lauren’s exit and stood there, trying to look inconspicuous.

Several minutes later, I caught sight of Lauren amidst the crush of homeward body traffic.  I swallowed my terror and followed her out.

It was an unusually cold day for September, and I had unusually bad fashion sense.  This is why I was wearing a winter coat, hood pulled up, and heavy gloves when I made my move.  Sexy.  “Hey, Lauren,” I called out.

She whirled around.  I have a terrible memory for people’s exact words, but I remember her response clearly.  “Oh!  Did you need a ride to jazz band?” she blurted.  I think she knew what was coming, and hoped vainly to divert it.

I was not to be diverted.  “Lauren, will you go out with me?” I blundered on.

The following moment was seared forever into my brain.  Lauren touched the tip of my ridiculously gloved hand and said, “Aw, that’s so cute.”

This was the single most devastating phrase anyone has ever uttered to me.  I would rather have heard, “You’re gross, get away from me!”  At least then I would have known that Lauren registered me as a grown person.  “Aw, that’s cute” suggested that my request was downright infantile, like a toddler asking if he could pay Mommy’s bills.  Cute, but so far beyond the realm of plausibility as to be absurd.  Which, frankly, I guess it was.

Lauren went on to say that she already had a boyfriend.  In my strategic preparation, I’d discerned which door she exited the school by, but not whether she was already taken.

“Well, that’s that!” I told myself as I walked home.  One of the ways in which I’d helped myself overcome my fear of talking to a girl was with the brilliant stratagem that if Lauren turned me down, I would simply, you know, choose to stop liking her.  That very day, I cheerfully told myself that I was over Lauren and ready to move on with my merry life.  I spent several weeks in furious denial of the unmistakable fact that inside my head, something was very, very wrong.

Eventually I couldn’t take the pain anymore and had to hop down from my fantasy universe and join the rather more grim plane of reality.  Getting rejected by Lauren was a useful but grueling learning experience.  I spent months coming up with one ridiculous theory after another, pining for Lauren all the while.  Finally, I came up with some explanations for my pain, sadness, and confusion that made sense.

I learned, well into my 16th year on this planet, that it’s possible to lie to yourself — and get away with it.  I learned that you don’t get to choose what you feel or don’t feel; you can’t make yourself like someone, nor can you make yourself stop.  I learned that I was hurt because I was afraid — afraid of what it meant that I did not command the attraction of someone to whom I myself was attracted.  And I learned that sometimes, the best thing you can do when you’re hurt is to acknowledge the fact that you’re hurt, acknowledge that you can’t do anything about it, and let time do its thing.

I didn’t have much worldly experience, but I drew on the fact that my previous crushes had disappeared completely.  If I could look at a girl I once daydreamed about and feel nothing whatsoever, then it stood to reason that my feelings for Lauren would eventually pass the same way.  In the meantime, I couldn’t stop myself from hurting, but I could at least stop lying to myself and grow up.  The cavalcade of stupidity that culminated in Lauren’s rejection ultimately taught me how to reflect.  In the end, I learned that you may not be able to choose your emotions, but you can know them and choose how to act on them.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the belated acquisition of these obvious insights was followed by one of the happiest years of my life.  While my crippled ego healed, I finally began to do well in school and took the first few baby steps down the long, painful road of learning how to interact with people.

Getting over someone is a gradual and imperceptible process.  You start by thinking about them slightly less than you normally do. Some days you might not think about them at all.  Then, bit by bit, other women start to worm their way into your thoughts.  And then you finally realize that the memory of feeling is stronger than the feeling itself, and the pining is gone.  When I set foot on my college campus nearly two years after that rotten September day, I was free of Lauren.

I saw her again years later.  I was home on vacation and had decided to catch a movie at the local theater.  Lauren sold me my ticket.

I was shocked when I saw her.  She had put on weight and was no longer cute.  But it wasn’t just the extra pounds that had erased her beauty.  Her hair was dyed an unfortunate color.  The addition of piercings to her face did little to complement it.  Most importantly, the contagious energy that used to radiate from her every feature was gone.  To use crude terms, she had become some combination of hippie, emo, and punk.  She didn’t look capable of laughter, and her eyes were dead.

We spoke briefly.  She had gone to OSU and was majoring in, of all things, Russian literature.  I idly entertained the ridiculous thought that knowing me had somehow influenced her interest.  I related some knick knacks of my own life, then hurried away to watch the movie.  The conversation was manifestly forgettable but for the fact that it let me hear her voice again.  The warm tones of affection — the timbre of unconquerable enthusiasm that I remembered — were gone.  The beautiful, enchanting girl I had pined for didn’t exist.

I reflected on the chance encounter and discovered three emotions vying for control.  The first was a shameful and petty, “Suck it! You destroyed me, and now I’m happy while you’re depressed and working in a movie theater!”  The second was a slightly less shameful but no less petty, “Whoa! Dodged a bullet on that one!”  And the final emotion was sadness.  What had happened to the girl who could steal your heart with a simple, “Hi, my name is Lauren?”  Was it a single event that had sapped her vitality, or a chain of regrettable decisions?  Even as I drew disgraceful satisfaction from seeing my former pine eroded to such a bleak individual, I felt sorry for her and hoped that someday she would be Lauren again.

Greg

I made four friends my freshman year of college.

It was one friend too few.

The upperclassmen dorms were six-person suites.  We could have entered the housing lottery just the five of us, but the housing board would have slipped us a random sixth person who would have been, presumably, even more socially inept than we were.  We decided to find our own solution.

It came in the form of Greg.  I forget who found him — maybe it was Dave — but Greg was a nice, reasonably smart, thoroughly unremarkable individual.  He evidently had no friends, so after helping to complete our sextuplet, he hung on for dear life and lived with us for the next three years.  In that time, I had maybe two conversations with him that advanced beyond the “I greet you” stage.

It wasn’t that Greg had bad social skills.  He had something much worse.

A girlfriend.

Her name was Alejandra, and to Greg’s credit, she was very pretty.  Greg was utterly devoted to her.  I guess the devotion was reciprocal, because at any given time in the three years that I “knew” him, Greg was either visiting her, inviting her to visit him, or talking to her on Skype.  Their relationship survived four years of long distance through college, and now they’re married.

Alejandra’s visits, though rare, left an indelible mark on all our memories.  If some girls are “screamers,” then Alejandra was a “laugher.”  Whenever she stayed with Greg, they holed up in his room.  Then, our suite trembled continually from the sound of her raucous, full-bodied shrieks.

I honestly don’t know what they were doing in there.  Sex is the obvious guess, but then, they were having a lot of sex, and only during the day.  Granted, if Greg’s fellatial prowess were truly the source of Alejandra’s stentorian hysterics, then he and she may have deliberately forgone night-time hay rolls out of simple courtesy.  Had I been rent from my slumber by that banshee wail, cardiac arrest would have followed shortly thereafter.  Even in my waking consciousness, Alejandra’s bestial howl would rip my soul from the Earth.  “What the fuck?  Did somebody just get murdered?” I would think in a wild panic before my senses returned.

The cause and frequency of Alejandra’s eruptions were an occasional source of bemusement to the rest of us.  Maybe they watched funny YouTube videos.  All the time.  Maybe they had an ongoing tickle war, and Greg was better at it than she was.  “What are they doing in there?” Kevin once said.  “Greg must just be a really funny guy,” Dave responded wryly.  We all laughed.  Dave’s comment dripped with cruel sarcasm — none of us had ever known Greg to be the slightest bit humorous or interesting.

Then again, none of us had ever known Greg to be anything at all.  Looking back, I see more tragedy than humor in Dave’s barb.  It’s possible that Greg really was a funny and fascinating man, full of clever insights — insights which, despite sleeping within 20 feet of him for three years, none of us ever got to know.