He watches her first from afar. She runs to the swings and Archer's eyes follow. He kicks the sand and looks back at me and then out at her. He waits for her to notice him but she's too busy climbing the ladder to the slide. Up she climbs and down she goes and Archer continues watching. He watches until he becomes self-conscious and looks back at me. I'm watching him and he knows it. Gives me a look like, "stop looking at me, mom. Can't you see I'm busy. I'm doing something, here. I'm figuring stuff out."
My friends used to be all boys. Because when you're little it doesn't matter who's carrying what equipment. There is little pressure. Few repercussions. No one understands their bodies yet. What makes a girl a girl and a boy a boy. No one gets drunk and accidentally has sex. There is little risk of violent jealousy or jealous girlfriends/boyfriends who forbid relationships with friends of the opposite sex. There's no marriage. There's just... the occasional hand holding under the swings.
About a year ago I met a guy at a bar. A little harmless flirting ensued over cocktails and cigarettes on the patio. He asked me my name and in return gave me his. He asked me where I was from and in turn told me his story. He had recently graduated from college and moved west to pursue film and music. He had a band. He casually mentioned his childhood in New Jersey. The small town he grew up in, outside of Princeton where his father was a professor. The story became familiar. The name of the town. His last name. Until. Wait.
What did you say your last name was again? What was the name of that town? Oh my God. I know you. I knew you. As it turned out, we had been friends before. In New Jersey where I was born. Our fathers worked together and our mothers were best friends. The world was pea-sized and we were clutching it together, slurring our mutual words of disbelief.
"Your name," I said, "was my first word. Your name!"
I shook my head until I went cross-eyed and he just laughed. He laughed and then I laughed and then he called his mother who was asleep and I called my mother who was dreaming.
"You were my first friend," I told him. "We were two-years-old..."
"It's been twenty-five years, then, since we last saw each other. I don't know that there is anyone else in the world I can say that to. "
Attracted to each other by fate or familiarity, we both spent the remainder of the evening trying to catch up, old friends that never made it past the dawn of our lives...
What if I never moved away? I kept thinking.
Would our friendship have lasted into the afternoon? .........................................................
I watch Archer and think back on that night. It was well over a year ago when it happened. We exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together. Meet for drinks. Dinner. That I would come out and see his band play. We promised one another we would absolutely remain friends because what were the chances!??? Old friends from New Jersey meeting at a bar in downtown Los Angeles all these years later? Unable to recognize one another because we were two-years-old when I moved away? It had to have been a sign of somewhat.
Or maybe it was just life.
We texted each other several times. Made plans that fell through. Never saw each other again. It's complicated, now. Too complicated, perhaps to re-friend a man who used to be a boy I bathed naked with in my mother's garden.
He's in a band, you know? He lives in a loft with a bunch of dudes and I have two kids and I'm married andandandand.... It's just, you know -- what it is.
"Maybe we'll run into each other again. Or something," I think.
I don't know why watching my son play with my friend's daughter makes me think of this man I don't know but once did: The boy who was my first word.
I think, maybe I should call him.
Nah, I remind myself. What would be the point? I have plenty of childhood friends I no longer speak to. Teenage friends I have long lost contact with. Highschool friends. Adult friends. Boys that became men. Relationships that became complicated because of sex and drinking. Drugs. Girlfriends and boyfriends and lines that should not have been crossed but were. Mistakes of mine. Mistakes of theirs. Love lost and found and confused and
"I love you, too. But not like that..."Less complicated.
I miss my friends. The ones that got away.
The boy friends who were never boyfriends. Our adventures on skateboards. Our trips to the desert. Bunched up in the passenger seats of beat-up trucks. Poop-jokes and take-out and smoking cigarettes out of bedroom windows. Trading mix-tapes and quoting movies and drinking out of each other's plastic cups.
It changes when you get married. When you have kids. It gets complicated. And that's okay. I'm happy, here, feet in the sand, watching Archer experiment with friendship. Letting go of fading photographs to make way for digital cameras.
I just... I miss Andrew. Even though I never really knew him. I miss him. I miss all of them. And watching my son play with his girlfriends makes me think of all the boys I loved and lost. The friendships that seemed iron clad when we were young. The friendship bracelets and trees carved up with our names, promises we would always be close.
Like brother and sister. "Forever," we told each other and ourselves.
It's sad to know, in retrospect, we were wrong.
I guess sometimes I just miss the days when it wasn't so damn complicated. When men and women were boys and girls. When it was just two people who loved the swings.
...is so grateful.
