A Girl...

Ever After

Procrastinating (again (still)). How about I tell you a short story from my past that wraps up neatly in a little bow tied by my future?

Having recently reconnected with a childhood friend (who I've just now realized was one of my favorite people growing up), I set to another round of Googling based on all the new information he unwittingly supplied me about himself--not knowing, of course, that I was going to search-engine stalk him. The more I Googled around, the more I found (nothing salacious, mind you), but the real goldmine was a little line on his Amazon registry that included his usual online handle--a screen name that happened to be just unique enough that it led me to comments he'd posted on a number of forums and websites. It was obvious when the comments were him and when they weren't, but none was more certainly him than a post on a forum for pianists, in which he called most amateur musicians "hacks" and said that the only real reason men learn to play any instrument is to impress girls and their parents.

Now, I always kind of knew he played piano, but he certainly hadn't ever advertised the fact, so I was as surprised as anyone when, for the junior high school talent show, he sat down at the big black grand in the auditorium to "accompany" our classmate Travis. That's how they were introduced--"For our next number, Travis will perform a selection from George Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue,' with accompaniment by J"--but what actually happened was that J cranked out a phenomenal performance of the showiest part of 'Rhapsody' (particularly impressive considering he was only thirteen or fourteen years old), and Travis, meanwhile, stood in front of the piano looking straight ahead and holding completely still until the very end of the piece, at which point he rang the striker he was holding in one hand against the triangle he was holding in the other--ding ding ding ding ding, like a farm-mistress calling her horde to dinner--and then took a bow and left the stage. I almost died laughing.

You know how they say (at least the neo-Freudians do) that girls very often marry men that remind them of their fathers? I think there's some truth to that; human brains love familiarity and since for most of us our fathers were the very first men we knew and loved, it makes sense that in our search for a partner we'd come back to that primary relationship. I also think that a lot of girls marry amalgamations of their former boyfriends--hopefully just the best parts of each--which I think is further support for the idea that we are attracted to the same men over and over, just in different forms.

For awhile now I've been trying to figure out the psychology behind why I've ended up with Simon when he is not very similar at all to my father (both of them are wonderful but in different ways), and the only thing that seemed to make sense was that in Simon I'd not found an approximation of my father but an approximation of myself. You know how pet owners often select (sometimes subconsciously) dogs that look like themselves? I thought that was the key to me and Simon--that we were reflections of each other, i.e., the freckles in our eyes were mirror imagese and when we kissed...well, you know the rest.

Now, after remembering the story about J and the talent show, though, I've realized that, at the risk of sounding creepy, he's been my model all the time--my Platonic ideal and my platonic love. Save for kindergarten, when I thought he was even more wonderful than the alphabet and show-and-tell combined, J and I never "like liked" each other or were even really that close, but now having thought back over all those years, and looked at the pictures from those times, I realize how very much I enjoyed his company, how constantly impressed I was by who he was. Sounds familiar, eh?

The talent show thing? Totally something Simon would do. And when I looked back through my junior high yearbook and some of the things J had written to me--"Summer sucks; I love school" and the witty nonsequitur "I don't need your pity"--are totally things Simon would have written. (Simon is, in fact, a little jealous that he didn't think of any of those things first. He has me quite securely in his grasp and yet still wants to be the only one who impresses me, the only one who makes me smile at the sheer cleverness of something he's said. I think this bodes well for our future.)

I've always been bummed that I didn't meet Simon until I was twenty-two, and didn't get to really know him until a few years after that. I missed so much of who he was and what he did--the breakdancing years, the surfer years, the community theater years, the track star years, the school government years, the world traveler years (I'm only sad I missed the loooong hair years)--but now that I've found J again, a part of me feels like I've found Young Simon too. I think that's why these kinds of trips down nostalgia lane--whether inspired by reconnecting with old friends or looking at old photo albums or hearing one of those context-soaked songs--mean so much to us: because even while they remind us who we once were and show us how much we've grown, they also evidence the many ways in which we're still the same as we ever were. The years change us, but ultimately we're still us in the end. I like that.