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Embrace

“How I longed for you to be here, to hold me, comfort me! I begin to understand the true meaning of the embrace. We embrace to be embraced.”

J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron

~

It had only been two years, but everything had changed.

An hour ago he had found himself pulled to the side of the road searching the reaches of his brain for any excuse to avoid something he’d been looking forward to for months. As he sat along the side of the lonely Texas highway watching a cow chew a mouthful of grass his mind drifted back to the roots of his current situation.

~

It was 8:54am. Monday. Andrew had been sitting in a mostly empty classroom in the English building reading a copy of the student newspaper. It was late august, and it was hot. Even though he was in Michigan he could feel himself lightly sweating from his walk from where he had parked across campus to the classroom.

Students had been entering the room, one after the other, but the mass entrance had not occurred yet. As each student entered he glanced up from the paper, the hope that a recognizable face would walk through the door being dashed every time. Still, he saw every one of his fellow classmates walk in and categorized them according to his standards of who he hoped would sit near him. (Being 20 years old, attractive females were always placed in the top category).

The room was filling up, yet as he’d sat towards the front of the room he had no one next to him yet. Finally he saw a body standing in front of the desk to his left, he was disappointed to see a young man standing there. He conceded that this was probably a very good person, but at 20 years old that couldn’t compete with a pretty face.

An older face came in through the door, clearly the professor. He carried several books and a brown leather portfolio. He looked self-important. He set down the books in a neat pile on a table, opened the portfolio on the lectern and glanced at his watch.

“We’ll give the others another couple of minutes, then we can get started.”

As the professor finished that sentence several students entered in a line, quickly filling the seats closest to the door.

“Ok, let’s get started…”

The class was uneventful, when it ended he did not get up - he had another class in the same room. It occurred to him that there would likely be several people in both classes. As the room emptied he craned his neck and verified this was true. A half dozen students remained, all looking like they wanted nothing more than to be free of that room.

Among the students still in their seats was an Asian girl, she hadn’t caught his eye when she entered right before the class had started. Now that he looked at her he could tell that she was beautiful. She looked in his direction, apparently feeling his gaze, and he looked away.

The next professor entered, and announced much like the first that he would wait to start the class so the others would be spared the embarrassment of entering after he’d started. After the room was full he closed the door, passed out syllabi and proceeded to lecture for the better part of an hour.

When the lecture had finished Andrew stood up and hurried out the door, only hesitating for a second to wonder if he should bring the newspaper with him. He decided against it and walked out into the crowded hallway.

He fought his way through the crowd and was relieved when he reached the stairwell and its relative calm. He climbed to the third floor, and entered another crowded hallway. As he walked he pulled a crisply folded piece of paper from his pocket. It listed his classes, times and locations. He verified the room number and put the paper away.

When he reached the room his next class was to be in he realized there was a previous class still going. He had noticed quite late and almost walked in. He stopped right by the door, took off his backpack, set it on the floor by his feet and leaned against the wall. He looked back into the classroom and listened to the professor talking to her class, telling them about what to read for the next session, wrapping up. He bent down to pick up his backpack.

He stood up and saw the girl from his first two classes standing across the doorway from him, looking disinterestedly at the student newspaper.

“Do I have you in three classes in a row?”

She didn’t answer. He fought the impulse to give up and remain silent; he repeated the question.

“Do I have you in three classes in a row?”

She looked up at him, and unexpectedly, she smiled. “I think so.”

“Cool, and just a heads up then, I may be begging you for your notes in a couple of months…”

Just as she started to respond the students in the classroom begin filing out, walking between them. After they passed he entered the room and took a seat in one of the nearest seats to the door, in the back row. He saw her walk in, and sit directly in front of him.

She turned and asked him if he’d bought the books for the previous classes yet and how much they had cost.

He answered that he had, then added “Here, if we’re going to be talking let me grab a closer seat.” He rose and walked around to the seat next to her. “By the way, I’m Andrew.”

~

So, it came to pass that they became friends in class. For three hours each day, three days a week they kept a running conversation going. Before long they had exchanged email addresses, screen-names, and finally, phone numbers. Their conversations always started on the topic of their courses, but never ended there.

Time went by, they grew closer. His heart had been broken when he learned she had a boyfriend, he got over it, and they grew closer still. When the time to sign up for classes for the next semester came around he hoped they would take something together, she was more proactive and brought the listings to class and told him what she thought he should take.

By the time they were ready to graduate and move on to the real world they now had a set date to go out to lunch with each other once a week. When something came up and they didn’t meet up he was crushed, he hoped she was too. They made promises to stay close after they moved away, but he knew that was no guarantee they would remain as they were.

~

Life happened.

He graduated. He moved home, and started applying for jobs. She did much the same. He moved across the country, so did she, but not in the same direction. They both worked a lot, were busy, and calls went missed and unreturned. The excitement of a birthday greeting was reduced to nothing more than a short text message. Time passed, conversations grew more infrequent and more awkward - talking to someone they both clearly felt like they should know better than they did. More calls went unanswered.

Every couple of months one of them would try to revive the friendship and would call the other. The result was sadly predictable the call would either get no answer or be received by an abbreviated conversation. After a while he gave up on the calls from his end.

Eventually, he almost forgot about her altogether.

~

Almost two years had passed, since he had seen her. He had been living and working in Texas and had created a life for himself. Getting up every day, going to work, spending time with his new friends. Living life. He wasn’t extremely happy with how things had worked out for him, but he also wasn’t sad. He was living, and for him, at that time, that was enough. Then one morning as he slipped into his cubicle and powered on his computer his phone chimed loudly. He glanced at it, saw the following message.

“good morning lol, i miss you :(”

He was glad the message was not delivered orally because his response came without emotion. Re responded: “i miss you too.”

“I’m moving to Austin, you can come see me!”

He stared at the phone, not sure how to respond. In the end he just returned a smiley face and let it be.

~

So, here he was, was pulling into the parking lot of an unfamiliar apartment complex to visit a person he no longer knew.

To her credit, she made him feel like she had never forgotten about him - she smiled and laughed as she always had done, she even mentioned a few things about him that he was sure she would have forgotten.

They had lunch at a cookie-cutter family-restaurant chain. The meal was filled with placeholder conversation that amounted to “how is so-and-so doing now?” and “do you remember when we…”  They returned to her apartment and sat on the couch. He was still not sure how he should feel about being there, how he should feel about her. A corner of his brain wished he had thought of an excuse when he had been pulled over earlier.

The conversation started to run out - in the past this was when they would have had their best times, laughing and sharing experiences, now sitting on a couch seemed alienating at an immense scale.

“Hey, I just remembered, I need to get some beer for later - wanna come with me and go now?”

“Sure” he was glad to have the silence broken.

They got into her car and began driving down a main road - she pointed out several places she liked to eat, a bookstore where she’d seen a book they’d read in a class they’d taken together, and the post office.

Eventually they came to the sprawl of a Wal-Mart. As they walked towards the grocery section she found the discount DVD container: a pallet holding up a cardboard box overflowing with movies. She almost literally dove in. They dug through the movies for several minutes finding the terrible movies, laughing about the suckers who would buy them.

They continued towards the cooler section. As they entered the cold air he looked at the labels. “What are you getting?”

There was no answer. He looked at her and saw her staring at him with tears in her eyes.

As he took a step towards her, pulled her close and held her, he felt his own eyes well up. He held her tighter. In that instant the distance of the past years vanished.

He knew other shoppers were walking past them, likely wondering what stimuli was so strong as to produce this reaction.

He didn’t care.

Embrace.