They Can’t Take That Away From Me

I have been singing this song for nearly ten years.  I only just got it last week.  Frank Sinatra has it wrong.

So I am in Boston, with Elisabeth, and Elizabeth, and Cody and Kevin and Alessandro and M.A.  And Tyler.  It is very, very good that I should be here.  Mostly everyone is actually too busy to deal with me now, and I feel rather guilty for distracting them from their studies, but the people I need most are here (except one, whom I will see tomorrow…Sam, my Sam…), and it is a sort of healing for me just to be with them.  I have made a new friend whom I anticipate keeping, also named Elizabeth just to make matters confusing, and I have reconnected with a number of people I made the acquaintance of in November.  I have also had some time, albeit limited time, with Tyler.

We finally managed to clear things up yesterday.  I finally understand how he actually feels, what he actually wants, and why he cannot do this right now.  Why we cannot do this right now.  With this understanding, the awkwardness has been dispelled.  It would be an overstatement to say that all is well.  But all shall be well.  And all is better.  I sat him down for dinner last night and said, OK, I wanted to be tactful and discrete but it isn’t allowing me to actually get the answers I need.  So I’m going to be blunt and specific instead.  And he said OK, and I asked him all my questions and finally got all his answers.  All of which were, in fact, the answers I had hoped for.

There is no one else.  This is not about someone else.  (This one is, in fact, still not really the question I wanted to ask — I wanted to ask about a particular person — but I think he knew that, and asking the broader question does not prevent receiving the specific answer.)  And he still thinks this has potential.  Assuming that he and I are both single in a year’s time when I move to the city, he wants to try this again.  I did not do anything wrong, nothing in me changed.  And this information he volunteered, without me asking: it is not the relationship itself, nor the distance.  The problem is that we are at the beginning of the relationship, when it takes a lot of time and effort, and everything is still settling into an order.  And it is the end of his first semester senior year at Harvard, and he does not have time right now to be in the beginning of a relationship.  If I were here, it might be different, because he would actually see me and it would be a different kind of time and effort.  But as is, he keeps having to get off the phone after ten minutes, he keeps being unable to send long, interesting emails, and he doesn’t feel that he’s doing the relationship justice.  It feels false, because he doesn’t have time to do it right, not because he doesn’t want it.  For him, he needs to go back to where we were in March, when he came to visit me.  And of course, following this, there was really only one question I could ask, and it was, of course, the question I had ultimately wanted to ask all along, without being able to put it so clearly.  In March, I said, you told me that you were already interested, you already wanted this.  So then, is this because of circumstance, or because you are over me?  And he said, this is circumstance.  This is not me being over you.  At least, that’s what he thinks.  The circumstance makes it hard to tell.  But he thinks that, in fact, he is not actually over me at all.

And that is all I had really needed to know.

So then, final question.  Will you still come to visit me in June?  You are still invited.  We have a spare room, so it will not be awkward.  And he said that he would like to, and he will do his best.  And thus it was determined, from conversation evolving from that, that we will still attempt to see each other once a month or so, as was planned before.  I will still come to visit next semester, which will be facilitated by my new friendship with Elizabeth — Elisabeth will be gone, but there will be other people here for me to see and perhaps even to impose upon enough to stay with them.

And following all these questions, an offer: he said that work is stressful, and right now dancing is stressful because he is having troubles with his partner.  And so I said, if you have time and are looking to de-stress, I will be here another day and a half, and if you would like, we can do some social dancing, and I am not stressful.  And he smiled, and said he would like that, and hopefully we will have time tomorrow night (now tonight).  If this actually happens, it will be very good…we both learned in March that, while we are able to control our words and our expressions, we are not able to control our energy while dancing, and I would like to feel that energy and feel that is has not changed.  And I expect that, if we dance, that is what I will feel.  It would also be a concession to and a realization of our plans, all our plans that fell through and died.  Or were put on hold.  That is better.  It is also more accurate.

And thus, at the end of all of this, he is not my boyfriend.  He is my "person."  I have a number of friends at school who have a "person," someone who is not their significant other but should be and would be under other circumstances.  Someone who they call, and visit, and talk about; someone who is not a formal obligation but is an emotional one.  If I meet someone else (unlikely though it seems), I can start something with him, and of course if Tyler meets someone else, he is not tied to me.  But if neither of us meets anyone else, or if we do and it does not work out, we will keep each other in mind and heart.  We are in each other’s present as each other’s future, if that makes sense, and it will be present in all our interactions, the way it was in December, the way it was in March until I decided that I prefered my future to my present and made an invitation and it was accepted.  The way, in fact, it has always been…

It is well.  I am a lot less sad, this is much less of a loss.  One of the things I was saddest at losing was having him to look forward to, and I have that back now.  Also the loss of him, and to large extent I have him back too.  To large extent I never lost him at all.

It is well.

–Stephanie