10:49 a.m. - 2005-01-25
Strange memories
You know what's weird about this therapy business? I have noticed that the day after I go to a therapy session is filled with the resurgence of odd memories.

Not even bad memories. Not memories of the regurgitated molding stew that is my childhood. Not memories of spending my young adulthood shuttling between doctor's appointments and emergency rooms. Not memories of all the lousy jobs I've had or all the crappy, cranky people who've come through my life.

Nope. These memories are just really....odd. Stuff I haven't thought about in years and years. it's like stirring up a compost heap and finding a whole onion undecomposed, or perhaps that a pumpkin has started sprouting out of the seeds you threw there last November. Something you never expected to find again, but there it is, alive and growing in the farthest reaches of the muck.

Memories like smoking a cigarette with my cousin when I was eight under our spirea bush, and being able to impress her with the fact that I didn't cough. Of course, I didn't cough because I wasn't actually inhaling, but she was only six and extremely gullible and thought that cigarettes were supposed to be smoked that way.

Or a store I used to go to in New York years ago. It was run by a woman who spent much of her time in India and Thailand, and was filled with exotic dolls and carved mirrors and clothes that were big enough to fit the average Thai woman, meaning that they were way too small for anyone in America over the age of twelve.

And even though the store was the size of a walk-in closet, there was a piano in the corner, because the woman's husband was a jazz musician, and liked to play the piano while he watched the store for her. She was a tiny, pale, brunette and he was a tall, thin, black guy, and together they made what I always think of as the epitomal New York couple.

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Today's bizarre memory is a little different though. I'm thinking about a guy named Sean.

I first met Sean in third grade, when he appeared sitting next to me on the first day of school. I fell in love with him instantly. I sensed he was as weird as I was.

It was not reciprocated though. I'm sure he didn't even know how I felt. Even in third grade, I was pretty good at keeping my feelings under wraps.

Of course, in my experience, love suppressed is love that grows, and so by the time we got to high school I was completely beside myself. It didn't help that he, like me, was one of the few oddballs in school - hippie, punk kids in a sea of Southern New Hampshire normalcy.

We were both on the high school newspaper, both worked on the yearbook, both read Dylan Thomas and listened to WBCN, at that time a radical underground radio station.

We were made for each other, except I couldn't tell him how I felt, and of course, he didn't appear to care.

By the time I left high school, I actually felt a little angry with him, or maybe at myself for being such a chicken that I could never tell him how I felt. I remember sitting under a tree one day with a friend and saying that I wished someday he'd regret that he didn't care about me. Strangely prophetic words....

Fast forward about ten years, to a bar in Boston. I'm with Bruce and we're dressed to the nines, celebrating something that is gone from my memory. I have on a sexy black dress, and my hair is falling in curls to my waist. I've managed to wear stilletto heels without falling down, and I'm at the bar ordering a virgin Bloody Mary.

Someone is at my elbow. Someone strangely familiar, yet...kind of pudgy and straggly looking.

"Don't I know you?" this strangely-familiar-yet-pudgy-face is asking.

It's Sean, my teenage way-beyond-crush. He looks awful, yet I still feel a surge of "Why doesn't he like me? I wish he liked me!!!"

Weirdly, with the way he is looking at me, he does like me. He likes me a lot!

"Wow, you look....amazing!" He's stuttering, and his hand brushes my hair. "Your hair....I mean, it's gorgeous! Wow, you look....stunning....I mean....you didn't look like this in high school!" His eyes wander down to my cleavage, which of course, is non-existant, but not for lack of trying.

"Times change. You look good, too." I lied. He looked so different, but not in a happy way.

He went on and on, about how I was one of the coolest people in school (certainly not what I remember!) and how he always wondered what had happened to me, and how he really wanted to see me again, and was I free for dinner the following night?

And in one of the rare "It couldn't have happened more perfectly" moments of my life, just at the moment he was asking me out, Bruce walked up behind me and gave me a huge, sloppy kiss on the neck.

Sean's face fell. It actually fell, and I had a very clear vision of myself sitting under a tree saying how I wished he'd realise someday what he'd missed. I actually felt really sorry I'd said that.

But strangely gleeful, too. There's something about suddenly being coveted by a person who has totally and completely rejected you that's a very heady experience.

I introduced him to Bruce ("my fantastic husband!") and we talked for a little while about people we had known in high school. When I said goodbye he touched my hair again, and shot what I swear was a look of envy at Bruce.

I saw him off and on for a couple of years, as we worked in the same neighborhood. I never did go out to dinner with him though, and he always made me feel subtly guilty. I never knew him to have a girlfriend, and I felt like i had cursed him somehow.

I haven't thought about him for years, but for some reason he's today's onion in the compost heap.

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