The walls

Have I ever told you the story about how I got this apartment?

Of course I haven't. I haven't shared a lot of stories because I am not a big sharer, because that would mean my emotions might be on display and, despite my Jewey neuroses, I'm also half Puritan/Protestant. And we, as a general rule, aren't so big on the sharing. Or the emotions.

My friend ST passed this apartment down to me. It's a weird story, really. I hadn't spoken to ST in several years when he called me up in the spring of 2004. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and was finding himself at a crossroads - should he stay in LA or move back to Boston? I had been someone he'd always liked and for some reason, admired, and thought I might prove a worthy distraction while he nursed his broken heart across the country.

To backtrack, ST and I met my junior, his senior year of college. He flirted shamelessly with me in the bars, and charmed me with an ice cream date one warm fall day. We hung out a handful of times, and he romanced me enough that I started to fall for him. Naturally, as a senior, he had no interest in having a relationship, and he started giving me the brush-off as soon as he sensed my feelings might eclipse more than hooking up. I was pissed. I wasn't surprised, but I was annoyed, especially since he had spent the better part of a year wooing me, getting me to like him, and just when I decided to ask him to my sorority formal, got a case of the Shitheads.

Because I was a cool girl, though, I let it roll off my back and got on with my life. We'd never had anything official and I had plenty of options that year. About a month after the formal, though, he came up to me in a bar, and started apologizing for blowing me off. Only instead of saying "I'm sorry I blew you off", he said something to the effect of, "I'm so sorry I hurt you." And I thought to myself, "Huh?" Cue screeching record as the DJ stops mid-spin.

"Sorry you hurt me?" I laughed. "Uh, we were just having fun, hanging out." I was lying through my teeth, of course, he had hurt me, just a little, but there was no way I would ever have admitted it. Plus, it was not okay - I could still see some senior smugness through his apology. He wasn't particularly sorry he had hurt me; just sorry that I didn't think of him in the same light I had before. That got me enraged.

"I can't believe how arrogant you are!" I spat, surprised. "You really think you hurt me? Who do you think you are? I never realized you had such a large ego." I continued like this for a minute and I watched his face fall, first in genuine confusion and then shame. He apologized again, this time much more sincerely, but I was proud on my high horse by then, thrilled I had managed to mask my disappointment and put him in his place, to boot!

He spent the rest of the semester trying to apologize to me; I gave him the silent treatment. Finally, on the night of his graduation, he came back to me with the most sincere words I ever heard him speak, and I softened. We shared a summer of phone calls and nights in Boston, and we spent the following year corresponding by mail - him in DC, I back in school. We weren't exactly platonic, but we weren't dating, either. Rather, I would write him about my boy problems, and he would write back feeding my ego and telling me I should never settle. Something about the way I spoke to him that night in the bar changed the way he thought of me, and he held me up to a standard I knew even then I could never meet.

Our friendship continued like that for the next year or two, sporadic letters and emails between different cities, the occasional phone call here or there. Until the day he got back in touch, the last I had heard from him was shortly after September 11th; he had just moved to Los Angeles and was calling to make sure I was okay.

After that call, we both moved on and I didn't think of him much. However close we had gotten that first year after the fight, I never felt a strong connection with him, any reason to continue the friendship other than to stroke my ego. So when he called that day in 2004, I was happy to hear from him but never in a million years expected that would be the phone call that changed my life.

We spoke for two hours that night. And then two hours the next night. And almost every night after that. It wasn't romantic - although I could sense in his rebound state he wanted it to be - but we quickly became close friends again, confidantes. He fed my ego more than ever, and I, having been miserable and lonely in New York for a long time by then, ate it up, ignoring the voice in my head that reminded me I would never, ever live up to his inflated expectations.

Within two weeks of getting back in touch, ST had invited himself to New York for a long weekend. I know he was imagining a blossoming romance, or at least hoping to make up for that semester at school; by the time he came, though, I was dating someone else, and we spent the weekend in an uncomfortable haze of passive aggression. Only a week or two after that trip, however, my summer romance ended, and I quickly booked a trip out west to visit him and maybe, possibly see if I could see myself in LA.

The first night in LA was great. We were happy, drunk, free to be without significant others or time zones or curfews. In the light of the second day, however, things went downhill. He had planned a trip to the Del Mar racetrack where we'd meet a big group and then spend the night at his friends' house in Laguna. For the entire drive down to San Diego, I was enamored with the scenery of LA, the gorgeousness of the day, the ease of traveling between cities without the New Jersey Transit. I hated New York, and I wasn't afraid to mention that every chance I got. We met his friends; they all asked me what I did, where I lived. I explained that I worked in fashion PR, explained what that meant, why I was so over my job and so over New York. ST would tell me later, once he started talking to me again, that I sounded so pretentious, so fake, nothing like he would have expected from me. I embarrassed him. To this day, I maintain that all I was trying to do was explain why I liked it there - in LA - so much.

ST wouldn't speak to me for hours that night - in front of his friends. He wouldn't speak to me until we were half way back to LA the next day. And then it all came out. He was disappointed I wouldn't give him a chance in New York, he felt emasculated, I wasn't the person he thought I was after all this time. Even though, mind you, most of this person he thought I was, was not me. It was a composite of the girl I had been in college and what he wanted me to be when he was on the rebound. It's not my fault I couldn't be that person for him.

But it was awful. He made me feel awful. Things were said, things that even later, when we calmed down and got over ourselves, left a permanent stain on the weekend. I knew we'd never be close friends again.

Of course, calamities aside, that was the trip in which I decided I wanted, no, needed, to move to LA. ST or no ST, I had enough friends there, enough work contacts, enough confidence that I was going to do it as soon as my lease ran out in March. In November I called him. We had emailed a little since the trip, but nothing major. Things were still fairly tense. "I'm moving to LA", I said. "Probably in March or April."

"That's really funny," he replied. "I was going to call you to let you know I've decided to move back to Boston."

"When?" I asked.

"Around the same time. I've been offered a job and the contract starts April 8th."

"Oh, well you should let me take over your apartment."

"Actually," and I could hear him thinking, "if you did, that would be doing me a big favor because otherwise I will have to break my lease."

Shortly thereafter we decided that he'd move out on Monday, I'd move in on Friday, giving the landlord enough time to paint, steam the carpets and get out the "boy" smell I was sure permeated after he had lived there for four years. I arranged to buy his bed and his TV and some other items at a minimal cost; this kept him from having to move them and also allowed me some furniture here on my first night.

Arranging the details of the move kept us in touch, but we never quite got over the last spat. We fought a few times over the course of the next few months, not because I cared about Fed Exing the keys or because he was worried about the bills, but because we were both still nursing the wounds we had inflicted on each other on that last trip. I haven't talked to him in three years, and I don't expect to, nor really care to, ever again. Although part of me does feel I owe him my life.

Along the lines of my bus theory, I do believe people come into our lives for a reason. Throughout our odd post-college friendship, and especially in the summer of 2004, I often wondered why ST and I were friends. Why had he tried so persistently to apologize to me that year? Why did he continue to hold me in such high regard? And why do we continually cross paths, yet never quite feel star-crossed? I believe 100% that I was meant to know him, to have stayed friends with him all that time, so that he could be the catalyst to my LA life - appearing without warning before I even knew I needed him, and then disappearing off my radar as soon as everything was in place. I have no doubt he has played his role.

The reason I'm writing about this now is because over the last few weeks, as I have been dating this guy that I like very much, I have done a tremendous amount of introspecting. Why do I find it so hard to open up? Why do I worry, over and over again, about not living up to someone else's expectations? ST was by no means the most significant person to make me feel this way, but I think he was the first, and having earned his admiration through my bar scene indignation, I think I let myself believe I'll always have to act that tough to earn a guy's respect.

What I have realized, in just a few weeks, is that while boys may be initially attracted to the distance, to the air of the unaffected cool girl, I'm not doing anyone any favors by hiding the person underneath. I've realized that I have been carrying this armor around for 11 years now, trying to maintain some mask that really no one has asked me to put on, and now - now? Now I am just so tired. I think I am going to try just being myself.