Please Wait For Me.
I didn’t know yet, my freshman year, that real love is actually about friendship. So when I befriended a redheaded freshman who happened to be male, it never occurred to me that the feelings I had about the redhead were the exact feelings upon which relationships are built.
I remember being on a hayride with the redhead (RH), laughing the entire time. Yes, we’d been drinking – but this was something different. This was the kind of fun I’d only had with females up to this point. He and I were actually bonding, sharing back-and-forth snippets, holding hands and throwing hay and drinking hot cocoa like we’d known each other forever.
I didn’t know it then, but I probably loved that guy.
We went out together, and we went out as part of a group, and we always had fun and we occasionally kissed and it was romantic and exciting and invigorating. I’d been in college a whopping two months.
But the closer we got, the more I got scared. For all of my desperation and neediness, I wasn’t ready to settle down. And I didn’t want to hurt the guy who was fast becoming my closest friend.
So I meticulously wrote a note to RH – in ink, backwards, so that he would have to hold it up to a mirror in order to read it. Then just as he was leaving one night, I handed it to him and hoped he would understand.
I’d written the lyrics to the Hall & Oates song, Wait For Me, all backwards and neatly fitting on one page, in the hopes that RH would wait until I got my act together before we got too involved.
Wait for me please wait for me – All right I guess that’s more than I should ask but won’t you wait for me…?
There were no cell phones then. The next day, RH knocked on my door and said, “How long do you want me to wait?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
And he said, “I can’t do that.” He had more self-respect in one finger than I had in my whole body.
And just like that, RH and I were officially just friends. I got really, really, really drunk that night.
We remained friends. A couple of years later, we had some beautiful, romantic nights together, drinking whiskey in seclusion. I still hadn’t gotten my act together, though, so I said goodbye to him again, still somewhat hopeful that I would get my act together soon.
Just before I graduated from college, when I was so much of a mess no one wanted to claim me, and getting my act together was a distant dream that was unlikely ever to happen, I heard that RH was engaged to be married. I sobbed uncontrollably behind closed doors.
A few days after his announcement, I ran into RH at a party, sitting by the keg.
“How did you know she was the one?” someone asked him.
“With everyone else,” he said, meaning me among others, “there was always something in the way, something that just wasn’t quite right. With her, there’s nothing. Everything is just … right.”
I wanted to vomit on his shoes. I wanted to run screaming through the house. I wanted to tell him he was a FOOL for not waiting for me when he’d had the chance, that for sure I’d have been ready by now. (I wasn’t.) Instead I nodded as though I understood, and took another swig of beer.
He talked as though we’d never been a couple. Maybe we never were.