on the sidelines, sometimes

(contains sensitive language and sex)

I think we went, that day, to the Thai restaurant towards the end of campus. Across the road from the university union, and close to the class we shared, it seemed a good choice for lunch. I remember feeling worried that you wouldn’t want to come with me. Once the class had ended, and the shuffle of notebooks and murmur of chatter began, I thought your kindness to me would end. I thought you’d only spoken to me because we sat together. On those hard, red, plastic chairs. In the middle of the small class. Surrounded by students with disheveled hair, large loose sweatshirts, scuffed trainers, sparkling eyes. 

But you came. When I turned around while walking out the academic building, you were still there, a few feet behind me. Looking at me with a curious expression. Hair tousled in the spring wind. Short white dress just dangling over soft knees. Navy blue cardigan around your slim shoulders. 

“Are you running away from me? I thought you wanted to get some food?” She smiled as she said this. A delicate, benevolent smile. The kind of smile someone elderly gives a teenager. A smile that says it’ll all be alright. Don’t worry. Just trust me. That kind of smile. 

You were studying minority politics. Although you wouldn’t tell me why. Aside from that you felt you were kind, and not much else. So you tried to do something in college to do with kindness. To do with making real change in the world. Which you couldn’t help but feel occurred on a very personal level. You said you loved drawing close to someone, softly uplifting them, and letting them go. You looked down at the sticky table then. Your eyes dulled a touch. And you tapped a finger against the table. The pitter-patter was lost in the sounds of conversations, of hissing frying pans. 

You came from Virginia initially. A little town lost somewhere in the Virginia mountains. You said your childhood was deeply pleasant. Memories began to seep from you, fresh and filled with life. You running through mountain meadows, in rainbow-striped pants, as the sun trickled away to a brown haze behind the hills. Opening the windows up gaping wide in the summer, as you were going to bed. Listening for ages to the hush of warm wind through the trees, the drum of rain against the dirt and pebble drive, the echoing distant boys’ laughter from the houses across the valley. You made yourself sound like a dreamer back then. Someone who cradles in their mind a world of lush goodness. Of golden-hued romances, of granite-blue waterfalls and expansive milky night skies, twinkling with a billion stars. No wonder I fell for you then. Just a few hours after we met. I didn’t think there were people like me around the university then. We always think that, as humans. That no-one is like us, until we meet someone who is. 

You first mentioned Andy when talking about the people you lived with. In a wooden student house with chipping green paint, next to one of the few ramen noodle shops in the area. 

He was one of two roommates you had. The other was a quiet girl, an imminent environmental scientist, who you’d known since your first year of college. In her stale dim dorm room, one evening towards that first sad summer between academic years, you agreed to live together. You had no-one else, you felt. No matter that you and her were night and day, black and white. She was kind to you, and you couldn’t bear to fumble through your first year of college with not a single friend. And so, you signed a lease together. 

You took Andy in after realizing, in October of your second year, that the rent there was a touch too high. Sitting with the quiet scientist one tail-end of summer evening, you mentioned you'd put up a Facebook ad for a roommate. Otherwise you just couldn't swing the rent. 

“Okay,” she said, in a voice barely louder than those floating and mingling amongst the groups of friends on the street outside. “But he stays in your little office. It’s the only other room big enough for another bed. And he uses the bathroom during your allotted times.” 

And so you welcomed a third member to your house. To clink through the fridge late at night, slightly tipsy. To trod quickly, towel bundled around his waist, down soft beige carpets back to his room after showering. To, from time to time, bring back shy women he’d met somewhere. “They all seem too quiet”, you used to tell me. “As if they’re ghosts. They retreat to his room after nervous introductions to us. And then we have to listen to the soft rocking of a bed upstairs, rhythmic and slightly unsettling. They disappear before I’m up in the morning.” I always sensed the faintest envy in your words, when you’d speak about Andy’s romances. Or perhaps you felt sympathy. That he needed some direction.  

I first met Andy in the spring of your second year, then. I happened to be in my second year, too. You invited me around to your house, a few weeks after talking over Thai food. I deliberated for hours, huddled away in my darkening, bland bedroom, down a long road from campus, whether I should go over. I still was so naive, so ignorant, so completely unaware of why someone would ever take an interest in me. Especially someone so imbued with vivid life, so dripping with the simple idealisms of youth. I myself felt boring, uneventful. I was always the gray solitary figure in colorful social groups. Whoever I was speaking with would feign a dash of interest, before looking for the first escape route from conversation. I was that person, back then. The person who tends to fade away, unnoticed.

You led me through the hall to the kitchen when I arrived. Andy was there, at the table, when we tottered through the door. Some simple smells lingered in the air. Of butter and the starchy durum wheat of pasta. Of broccoli, steaming wet in the microwave. He took a few seconds before furtively glancing up from his food. He was less than I expected. Less tall, less imposing, less dashing or macho or intense. He seemed just like us, really. Fumbling through early college, head buzzing with ideas and failures and the endless confusion of youth. He had a straight Roman nose, paper-pale skin, a ruffle of curled brown hair, cut short by a bad barber. He smiled at me, when I poked my head from behind your shoulder. He shook my hand as I settled into a kitchen chair. He shook yours too, funnily enough. A shake that lasted just a touch too long. You glanced at me as I watched this moment of intimacy. As if I’d seen something I shouldn’t have.

That’s when I first supposed you were sleeping with him. And that you’d asked me over that night without the slightest thought towards romance. I was a plain friend, an unadulterated class companion. Nothing more at all. This made my heart hurt a bit in my chest, I remember. Like someone’s thick hand tightening around the muscle. 

Later that night you confirmed my suspicions. Not that I had any reason to be overly angry. Andy seemed pleasant. A thoroughly nice man. But after falling in love with you, in my own simple way, it seemed quite painful. This person you’d taken in purely by necessity. This figure you’d complained a handful of times about, behind his back. He was now permitted into your inner space. To push stray strands of hair behind your ear, to grasp your hand while walking back, late at night under indigo skies, and squeeze it hard. To kiss you slowly, from your rose lips to the beige inside of your thighs, covered with a meadow of downy hair. To make you come, breath whispered and wet in his ear. I hadn’t been able to shake these thoughts since I’d met you. And now Andy’s face appeared in them, not mine. 

“It was so out of the blue.” We were chatting in your room now, cross-legged by the white-washed door. Dinner had ended, and you’d led me by hand up the stairs. Your eyes widened and darted around as you spoke. Like when speaking about childhood memories. I felt, then, a pang of envy towards Andy. He had entered your beautiful idealisms. “He invited me for a drink in the ramen shop, after a long night of studying. I felt too tired to resist. He’d asked so many times. I wasn’t expecting much. But he was lovely that night. He really opened up to me.” You were speaking in your stutters again. I leant back against the wall as I listened, and drew a long breath in through my nose. I felt myself beginning to fade again, into the silver moonlight of your room.

“It’s good that it happened,” I lied. “I know you’re a bit lonely here. It’s so different from Virginia. There’s nothing beautiful here. Just ugly concrete streets. You’ve replaced meadows with student parking garages.” You met my eyes here, and we laughed together. You leant towards me as you did, teeth baring two rows of tiny, gleaming teeth. Your hand settled on the green cotton covering my calf as you laughed. My throat constricted and then released. My chest felt light and airy, full of nerves. I settled myself before speaking again. You were scrutinizing me, now, through the slivers of remaining light in the room. “I thought you’d fall in with someone,” I said. “I just didn’t think it’d be him.”

You kept your fingers on my calf as you decided what to say. Pulsating each one individually, as if lightly playing the piano. There was something new between us now. An emotion I felt I was suddenly giving off. That terrible thing - that I’d go on to feel a handful of times throughout the remainder of college - of just missing the mark. Of a friend warming to someone else, never me. Of watching plaintively from the sidelines, as life’s goodness passes you by. 

“I know this might seem strange when I say it out loud. I’ve only ever thought about it in my head. And, fuck, we’ve only been friends for a few weeks. But I feel as if you’re a handful of people who’re going to matter in my life.” Her words were tender. I knew she was telling the truth, but holding something back, too. Holding back what I really wanted to hear. 

“I matter to your life. But not enough. Not as much as him, anyway.” I motioned my head towards the closed door. Towards Andy, somewhere in the gloomy house. It slipped out, and sounded harsh. But it was one of those odd moments where I didn’t mind. I wanted her to care about me. To know I missed her, when back in my apartment, alone. I think she sensed that. 

She crawled her fingers up my calf, towards my knee. Her smile from laughing before had disappeared now, like a cloud blotting out the moon. “You do matter to me. But the timing wasn’t right. Don’t fade from my life. You give me something he can’t. Something solid and controlled. Something warm.” 

I thought then of a black sturdy frame around a bone-white canvas. A canvas on which she’d proceed to splash colors and wiggle out little drawings. A canvas on which the events of her life would be recorded. And I was just the frame. This always happens, I thought then. People can only take so much from me. And it’s never enough.  

I hugged her that evening, and gave her damp cheek a kiss. In the weighted dark of her bedroom. As we sat on the scratchy worn carpet. As someone washed up pans in the kitchen next-door. I kissed her smooth cheeks, firm and round and the color of pale mango. I tried, as much as I could, to tell her everything through that kiss. That she may be just right for me. That my heart trembled and quaked for her. That being just her friend would be hard for me.

~

The semester continued, then. With stuffy afternoon classes filled with jumbles of students, all with stories and worries of their own. With still evenings that seemed to last forever, head down towards a book, looking at lines but hardly taking them in. With occasional meals with her, Thai or Chinese or perhaps just sandwiches, after which she’d invariably invite me back to hers. To sit around the table with Andy, hiss open bottle after bottle of some Belgian beer she’d recently discovered. She was quite the connoisseur. I’d watch, left shoulder slumped to the wall, fingering the open hole at the top of the bottle, as she rambled about the bitter notes, the subtle cardamoms, the alcohol-to-flavor ratio. Sometimes I’d catch Andy’s eye while she chatted away. He’d give me a lopsided smile, full of sympathy, as if she’d told him all about me in private. I felt a tinge of blush come to my cheeks when that happened. But I never felt anything bad towards him. Just a quiet sense of sorrow, really. 

I’d walk home from those nights with a roving mind. Slipping down back alleys littered with cars and bins and bottles to kick, I just couldn’t understand my position to her. Did they feel more comfortable with me there? Was she under some sort of shackle with Andy, which fell free once I sat listening too? I was supposed to be in the midst of university. This grand time to explore myself, to cultivate something, anything, worthwhile. Instead I was perched at her table, drinking beer with her lover, trying to pretend I had no deeper feelings. I’d let my head fall back then. To look at the bottomless night sky. To speak whispers with the stars, who had nothing to say but that life continues on, cold and twinkling and eternal. I’d huff in freezing air, and plug my mind for the rest of the walk home. 

~

It was next summer when you told me. We were standing in my kitchen, for once, speaking about our day. The air was thick and heavy and hot. It was mid-August, the height of sultry summer. My apartment, basic enough to lack air conditioning, seemed dense and filled with steam. You had on loose yellow pants. A sleeveless t-shirt too, that muttered something in Italian, in small red letters below the left breast pocket. Our conversation came to a lull in the heat. It suddenly seemed as if we were speaking very loudly. Shouting, almost. In that way that college students do. Flushed with summer goodness, with deep blue lakes and dewy grass and salty skin and breathless sex.

“We’re not seeing each-other anymore, you know. I’m surprised you didn’t guess. Although it’s only been a week. But, yeah, it’s odd. Our relationship seemed to start and end without much fuss. It did leave a throb in my chest for a few days, though.” You glanced over at me as you said this. From where you were standing by the cooker. The light washed in through the window. Golden and hazy, sunlight that seemed right for private conversations. 

“You’re joking. Really? But he’s still living with you, isn’t he?” I gripped the chill of the granite countertop behind me. I felt some huge shift within me. The turning of some essential life dial to a new setting. 

“He isn’t, no. We had a bit of a bust up. Loud and raucous, followed by a long sad night. He left a few days ago, after canceling his lease. He paid in full what he owed me for the rest of the year. But yes, he’s left.”

She slumped down on a kitchen chair. She pulled fingers through stranded hair, and wiped beaded sweat off the tip of her nose. I came over and knelt by her.

“I feel drained, to be honest. Like my energy’s been wiped away. A certain life force has left me. He took it with him when he went. To wherever he was going.” She closed her eyes now. I caught her perfume as I shifted closer. Something redolent of another time in her life. Virginia, perhaps, before the weight of serious life and relationships began to press down. 

“Can I say something?” I asked, while taking her hand in mine. A friendly gesture, one I’d done plenty of times before. She glanced over at me, and shifted with a sigh. I held her eyes for a few moments. We both broke into slight smiles that seemed tired and sad. “You told me ages ago not to fade from your life. I didn’t. I seem to fade from everyone else’s. I’ve stuck around, and I’ll continue to, if that’s what you want. But I want a chance now, with you. To love and hold you. To be with you. To be something more than friends. What do you think?” 

My knee pressed against the wooden floor as I knelt. Summer smells came through the open window. Something charred and smoky. Her eyes fluttered to mine, and then away, and then back. I thought of long nights with Andy and her, drinking beer. I thought of walks home, feeling as if I was floating away with every step. Away from anything important. I thought, too, of our first meal together. Of how alive she seemed to me then. I wouldn’t let her fade too. I couldn’t. Together, we could feel full again. I could give her what Andy had taken. I could give her what she gave everyone else.

“I think I’d like that,” she said, in a voice barely audible.