Perfectly 1993 Guy, Part Eight

 

 

Okay I’m writing three different stories at once right now but that’s gonna have to be okay. I think this story might shine some light on the like story I’m currently living about The Drummer.

 

So Perfectly 1993 Guy had started college and I had gone home to live with my dad. We were a six-hour Greyhound trip apart. In those days, well before I could capably drive and when EVER owning a car seemed like a crazy dream, the Greyhound was the route to all things meaningful. Standing at the bus station that Friday night/Saturday early morning waiting for him would’ve felt like I was cracked open and shining love everywhere. That’s a big feeling given that, in this case, my dad must’ve driven me there to pick up my long-distance love, possibly in the middle of the night. It seems to my memory that most Greyhound things in Small Hometown City happened at about 3 AM.

 

Whatever the hour, my blank canvas of a bedroom felt golden with Perfectly 1993 Guy in it. In my arms, kissing and cuddling, he felt so warm but also so evanescent. I’ve never been more aware in my life of how many hours were left until Sunday at 1 PM, when I’d have to say goodbye again.

 

That Saturday night, the midnight between our two birthdays, felt incredibly momentous, sacred, solemn. He had told me a few weeks before that, aside from a just-the-tip occasion with his previous (regular  normal fancy rich person) girlfriend, Perfectly 1993 Guy considered himself a virgin. His first time felt like such a huge deal to him, and I was honored and daunted to be chosen. I felt a little unworthy, given how experimental, reckless, and haphazard I’d been just a few years before. Before my heart pendulum had swung wildly back to the chastity of the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow.

 

Before that, though, all afternoon on his birthday, we walked and walked all around Small Hometown City. I showed him a couple of the coffeeshops that I had become completely obsessed with, and which would become my home-away-from-home in years to come. I ordered jasmine tea, which tastes not-great but feels very fancy.

 

We walked and walked and walked. Somewhere in all that love-and-anticipating-goodbyes glow and idle chitchat, I (accidentally?) said “This just feels so temporary.” I don’t think I’d ever seen a man so affected by my careless words, and I maybe haven’t since. He slipped into a silent funk, closing his shoulders off and walking a few feet ahead of me. I remember him (in those dreamy green Docs) climbing up onto the not-very-high ledge of the art museum’s planters, now walking ahead AND above me. He was hurting and escaping, and I didn’t know how to get him back. And we had so, SO little time.