Requisite Distance

I learned a number of things in the Summer of 1997 -- one of which is that they turn Boston's Citgo sign off at the stoke of midnight.

It's a Thursday, or at least it was; the night has cusped over from the end of July to the early hours of August, and my best friend in the world -- we'll call him David -- and I are standing on the sidewalk in the exact middle of the Harvard bridge (182.2 Smoots, Halfway to Hell); we are a mere 16 hours from the end of our giddy week of running around the Massachusetts seaboard. We'd begun the previous Saturday on Nantucket, staying with our good friend Mike and his family at their friends' "cabin" (which was more of a complex, a sprawling network of one-and two-story wooden buildings all stained that particularly New England shade of bluish-grey); our time there had included my introduction to things like swimming in the non-tropical regions of the Atlantic, rinsing off seawater under a steaming outdoor shower (the sensual, slightly deviant delight of being naked under the open afternoon sky: smooth wooden boards under my feet, cool breeze on so much of my skin, beach and horizon in the near distance), the glorious perfection of taking in the sunset while walking down a dirt road with my two favorite people, my first gin and tonic in hand. I am 17 years old, 1500 miles from home, in love with the East Coast and the ocean -- with summer and sunlight, with travel and freedom, with gin; all hail the juniper berry, I have discovered that I am in love with gin.

I'm also in love with David, but that's beside the point. It's the furthest thing from the point, at least as far as I'm concerned: I've spent a solid seven months running from this fact, have fervently denied it from the moment it dawned on me (via a peculiar dream in which he was dying of brain cancer and I went with him to his own funeral), have convinced myself that I've successfully reprogrammed whatever squishy, irresponsible organ engendered such an inclination in the first place. David is my friend, my closest friend, the first person ever to stay up until 3 in the morning with me drinking tea and trading armchair philosophy; he's the first person with whom I've been so honest who hasn't called me crazy or asked why I think about such things in the first place. He's listened to my ideas, told me of his own, introduced me to the wonders of British comedy and the writings of Douglas Hofstadter; he's given me hugs when I was sad, held me while I cried, and never once complained about being left with a t-shirt soaked with snot and saltwater and saliva. Of course I love him, but not like that.

Eric's response: ``Well, how will he wake you up?!''

I don't know how to answer this question either, am not particularly concerned about it and therefore have not inquired; this does not make Eric feel better. I love him (yes, like that -- or so I tell myself; at least, I know I used to), but he's driving me somewhat crazy. We've almost broken up several times since the spring, but each time I've lost my nerve (or, when it's his turn, talked him out of it); more than anything I want the two of us to be on good terms when he leaves for college at the end of the summer, am convinced university life will show him that we should not get married once we have degrees, believe that our one year age difference (the same gap I share with David and Mike) will be the thankful circumstance that shepherds him into giving me what I say I need and what he says is impossible: a friendship after our relationship. We are reciprocal First Loves; we have traded virginities, and engaged in long months of nearly all the associated experimentation. It doesn't seem right that we should grow into unconnected adulthoods, that this first Miracle of Mutual Attraction won't stretch and settle into Christmas cards and the occasional phonecall; if we can just survive until his departure, I tell myself, it will all turn out okay.

This is what I've left behind for the week, one timezone and three hours of air travel to the west along with my parents, my little brother, and two summer jobs; swallowed up in the excitement of travel and motion, of new places and sensations, I can't say in truth that I miss any of it. Every moment of this trip has been so intensely real, so vibrantly saturated with pleasurable detail; even episodes that might have been problematic -- our last night on Nantucket, when David half-carried me (giggling and semi-incoherent) back to the house after he, Mike, and I shared a mostly-full fifth of vodka that Mike had brought along while sitting huddled together on the beach playing End Of Summer Confessions under the moonlight; David's and my first day in Boston, which included getting lost and dragging our luggage down the entire length of the Fenway in the height of the sticky afternoon heat (it's the pre-Google era, after all, and neither of us have cell phones; limited to analogue navigation techniques, our map-reading skills have failed to realize that the Fenway T stop and the co-op where we are staying are, in fact, at opposite ends of that road) -- even these incidents have been delightful adventures, have failed to dampen our moods in the slightest. With David's transportation map at hand, with Zagat as our tour guide, we are taking in the city that David will call home in less than one month's time.

Yet there are times when the whimsy hides a current of wistful, instances in which something registers that I quickly brush aside: the way my heart jumps -- and then aches -- when he leans his head against my shoulder for a moment as I sit perched on a Brookline windowsill while we wait for a bus which never actually comes (because we're waiting in the wrong spot); the almost unbearable electric tension as we casually hang over the side of my sofa bed in our room at the co-op, sharing his headphones to listen to the Indigo Girls album I'd bought that afternoon at Tower Records on Newbury Street; the very, very long time we'd spent standing behind one of the salt and pepper shakers on the Longfellow bridge, staring at the Citgo sign reflecting on the water, watching Wednesday's light disappear, leaning arms over the edge and speaking in subtext of so many things -- but always from the Requisite Distance of 12 inches. The never acknowledged (but fastidiously observed) rule between us is that these 12 inches illustrate, even define the platonic nature of our friendship: if when all is said and done we are 12 inches apart, then our actions are defensible -- be they the long protective hugs, the therapeutic attention paid to my chronically tense shoulders, the fact that I'm so often in his living room as a Saturday or Sunday begins to crest. Eric may feel angry and threatened, Mike may insist that we're ``subliminally attracted'' to each other, but the 12 inches bear constant witness to the ultimately innocent and unassailable nature of our bond: this distance makes our closeness sanctioned, safe.

There are moments, though, in which that narrow space is a gulf -- times at which I feel desperate and imprisoned by the empty air, so close that I can feel the heat coming off his flannel shirt if I roll my own sleeve and focus, near enough for even his smaller movements to stir the warm, earthy scent of him up to where I can catch it and savor for an instant the sense of being Home and I plead silently to the Universe that just this once he'll move closer; though he's not out of reach, I am shy and tentative beyond the point of reaching. It's been happening more and more as the summer's gone on, and in the underbelly corners of my mind that I won't share even with David, I am in acute and extraordinary agony: on every eyelash, every 11:11, every yellow light and every breath held through a highway tunnel -- more than anything else in the world -- I wish for something I can't bear to wrap in words, something I know to be impossible. Of course he loves me, but not like that -- and I push the thought back down toward whatever terrible crevice let it out, angry and embarrassed, ashamed.

It's dark now, and the wind on the water's getting cold; we're still watching the sign shift through combinations of red, white, blue on the black surface of the Charles, over and over in a comfortable but bittersweet silence. Things like this keep happening with us, and I can't help but feel as though he somehow catches these moods from me: though I try to ignore it, each wonderful moment has become an increasingly overwhelming reminder that time is running out. In two more days we'll go home, back to parents and jobs and constraints; we'll go home, and then he'll be gone forever -- back to the magic and excitement of a new life in Boston, while I'll be left to languish through another year of Midwestern preparatory school on my unhappy, isolated own. I don't want to go back, ever; I don't want to leave, won't even leave this bridge if that's what it takes. I'm happy here with the lights and the river, with the sounds of the traffic and the subway trains; with the rough granite against my forearms, and my dearest friend a foot to my left.

Eventually, however, we do make our way across; we stroll along the Esplanade, cut over to Newbury Street, stop by J.P. Licks for ice cream, and arrive back at the co-op a mutually sticky, melt-covered mess. We take turns washing up in the kitchen, each of us changing while the other is out of the room; we stay up talking, each of us perched on our own respective portion of the area where the corners of our sofa beds touch, a hint of melancholy from the bridge still seeming to hang in the air -- or maybe it's just me. After a while David gets up to turn out the lights, then awkwardly stops halfway across the room: am I okay? Are my shoulders still sore? It's a nearly rhetorical question -- I'm a ball of endless tension, my shoulders are always sore -- but my stomach jumps for the unexpected inquiry; I wonder, just for a split-second, if he might also be reluctant to give this up, might alongside his excitement for the future also regret our inevitable departure from this parallel universe where we live randomly in a sunroom, where we have nothing but each other and all the time in the world to explore a new, untainted city.

I'm still stretched perpendicularly across the foot of my bed; he turns off the lights, comes to sit beside me, and once again begins -- from an appropriate distance -- the impossible task of trying to release a young lifetime's worth of stress and anxiety from the contorted mess near the base of my neck. When his hands tire he doesn't move, but instead lies down to sleep where he is; nor do I attempt to rotate back to a more typical alignment. For the first time ever we sleep on the same bed: 12 inches apart, both pointed in the wrong direction, even my shorter legs leading to feet dangling off into space at the end.

Thursday begins as I walk up to get breakfast, granitas and donuts from Dunkin' Donuts and juice from Symphony Market; the idea is a surprise rooftop picnic. David is awake by the time I return, but we bring all these things to the roofdeck anyway and eat while looking out at the Fens and the cars curving by on the Pike in the distance. It's a beautiful view: all trees and park and flat city rooftops, community gardens across the waterway, Fenway Park just a little past those; we resolve today to be back in time to photograph the sunset, though the finality of it all -- that this is it, this is really our last night -- is no longer possible to ignore.

Late that afternoon, I do indeed get my photos of the sunset from the roof; I get some self-timer shots of David and me standing in the last pools of light as the colors sink into the trees below. We celebrate our last night of travel by going to Ginza in Chinatown for sushi, and have an amazing meal; full of sake and sea creatures, we've just arrived back at the co-op when David decides that what we need is a photo of the Citgo sign on the river. The last thing I want is for the night to be over, so I'm happy to oblige; we run in to get my camera, run out - then realize as the door shuts behind us that we've left both my sweater and the key inside. For a moment we consider ringing the bell, but in our excitement these things seem of little importance; we have a mission to accomplish, and we are off.

This is how it's become the last minutes of July; this is why we are walking down the Harvard bridge (because it's closer than the Longfellow). We are counting Smoots, watching the reflections on the water, finding the structure's midpoint; I am taking the lens cap off, turning the camera on, turning around to look back--

--and it's gone. Off. (They turn it off?)

David looks at his watch, figures out what must be going on; we burst out laughing, stare at the grey outline where the neon should be, keep walking over the bridge into Cambridge -- we can't get back into the co-op (for now), and so have nowhere else to be. We wander along the river, come to Killian Court at MIT, walk to the center and lie on our backs staring up at the stars: I know Orion, the Big Dipper; he can find Lyra, Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux. We make up new constellations of our own, and keep an unsuccessful eye out for shooting stars.

The dew sets in, as does renewed awareness of our 4 P.M. flight.

All at once we are no longer autonomous characters in the middle of a fantastic adventure: we are a 17 year old girl and an 18 year old boy, a rising high school senior and an almost college freshman. Technically speaking, we are someone's girlfriend and someone's only child. We've been taken to the airport and let loose into the world with some extra pocket money and a complete lack of supervision; we are so responsible, so well behaved, that our parents actually thought this was a good idea. We're imaginary adults, and we're good kids. We are damp and lying in the wet grass in the middle of the night, and I am shivering in my thin shirt to the point of near-convulsion. We are each the closest person to the other, but as always we're separated by the requisite distance -- even now, even as we're soon to be separated by half a continent. We speak in metaphor and subtext, couch emotion in vague theoretical concepts, cannot differentiate between our fear of mere reflection and the other's living, breathing truths; I can't tell if he's really feeling so wistful, or if my grief is so expansive that it's painted the whole world shades of plaintive regret. I'm trying to hide how cold I am, but my teeth have begun to collide with a nonnegligible force; still, I don't want to go.

Even in the dark, I can see the concern on David's face as he notices how hard I'm shaking; I try to think of all the ways there are to say, ``I'm fine,'' try to determine which will be the most effective. He will want to head back, to try and get me inside; I don't want this to be over, don't want lights to show that I'm on the verge of tears. There's a second before he says anything, and then -- so softly:

``Hey, come here; I could use a hug anyway...''

Arms opened, he's not sitting up -- and I'm not waiting for him to move. I've rolled onto my side, reduced twelve inches to six; slid nearer as his arms pulled me closer, threaded one arm out and the other around him, tucked my knees in under his to close the gap. I'm holding onto him as tightly as I can, until he gently points out that the way my face is pressed into his neck is half-choking him; he's doing the best he can to stop me from shivering, but the net result is that the whole human tangle of us is now vibrating at an uneven, spastic frequency. This doesn't matter; none of it matters. Though the pressure lightens slightly, David makes no move to let go of me -- and I've no intentions of letting go of him, either. He is warm, and he smells like himself, and his heart is beating so fast beneath my cheek on the other side of his ribcage; every so often, his free hand smoothes a damp piece of grass or hair back from my face. We stay like this, for a while - a long while, even as the occasional student goes passing by. When I'm warmer and finally feeling brave, I ask him:

``So...is this maybe the first thing that can't be brushed off as completely platonic?''

A split-second, and then oh -- the lovely way that he laughs in response, the way he brings me what's left of ``closer'' within the realm of physical possibility; the way he hesitates just a second before kissing where my eyebrow meets my temple, then laughs again -- should I be surprised that he's so happy? I can feel my face turning shades of scarlet I never knew existed, am smiling so hard into his collarbone that I'm afraid my jaw will pop off; the sensation that follows from the brief moments of eye contact we're able to make is overwhelming, almost incapacitating. We are moderately covered in dirt and grass, significantly entwined, and sprawled across the lawn of a major research university at an indeterminate pre-dawn hour; neither one of us can stop giggling.

``So, um...'' I ask, pulling myself up until my nose touches his, ``it is...okay, if--''

[I look up and eye contact whoa -- I can't help it; I'm grinning, laughing, rubbing my cheek lightly against his on my way to curl into his shoulder; he's laughing too:]

``Yeah, I didn't -- I wasn't sure if--''

[He's laughing, I'm laughing, three arms wrapped so tightly and one deflecting off at an angle; when I can I take a deep breath, push up on that errant elbow, stare right into his eyes and smile with every open, terrified intention:]

``Yes.''

And there it is: the silent moment in which everything becomes apparent, in which there are no more secrets between us. His smile in return is so beautiful, is somehow unlike any other time I've seen him smile; I can still see it as I close my eyes -- it is, in fact, the only thing I can see and I can feel it spread to my mouth, too, as I lean back in toward him. I drop my elbow and sink toward the grass, feel the soft part of his belly against mine, feel how quick and shallow his breathing is; I know he can feel mine as well, feel the involuntary, delighted gasp when our lips finally brush for the first time. His lips are so soft, so much softer than I would have--

--and then, there are no words; there are no thoughts, only sensations and overpowering, brilliant awareness. We are kissing, this -- boy? Man? David -- David and I are kissing. I am close to and kissing the person I love most in the world, the person who knows me better than anyone else; in this moment, beneath Orion and Ursa Major -- under the watchful gaze of Castor and Pollux -- I have discovered the Miracle of Mutual Understanding, am dissolving into its unimagined perfection. Shy and slightly awkward as we suddenly are, nothing has been so instinctually right; I have never been so safe as in this open, public place, nor so comfortable as on this cold, wet ground. I'm still shivering, but I've never been so warm; my brain is exploding, but I've never felt such peace.

It will all be over so soon, but for now...I am home. And nothing else matters.

George Helene Lox