I haven't been totally honest. The distance I spoke of with that earlier girl was not immediate. In fact, roughly a year after her marriage, she invited me to accompany her to a place known for its happiness and joy. She had an audition and interview with a professional theatre company known for its penchant for musicals. Her husband was not able to get off work, and her other then co-best friend (now elevated to solo status, and was superior anyway) had not the money to make the trip. A weekend of delight awaited me - not for anything to happen, of course. I am far too disgustingly moral for that, and besides which, the year-point is a critical time in marriages, for the first bloom of novelty and honeymoon ecstasy has subsided, to replaced with a quiet, happy tranquility in good marriages or the first cracks of dissolution in bad ones. Needless to say, theirs was the good kind, and rightly it is so, for he is a far better man than I in every conceivable respect.
No, what thrilled me was the prospect of two and a half days of just being alone with her - an event that had never occurred ever in the history of my life with any non-relative female, let alone one I cherished so much as her. I envisioned long conversations, loads of fun, and most happy for me, hours at a theme park with a pretty girl at my side... a private wish I'd longed for ever since I was six and saw an impossibly beautiful blonde kissing her boyfriend in the line for The Demon at Six Flags Great America.
Unfortunately, what I had not counted on was my snoring, which, unbeknownst to me heretofore, has the sleep-destroying quality of blaring dubstep at max volume. The next day, she was so fatigued from lack of sleep, she opted to stay in and get rest before her evening audition, and suggested I go to the park by myself, as the next day we were going our separate ways, and my flight was much earlier than hers. Seeing the good sense in the idea, I went and wandered, going on rides and browsing stores, managing to have a good time in spite of my crushing disappointment.
That night, I sat in the lobby while she went to her audition, hoping she did well and battling my own feelings of bitterness. You see, when I was much younger, far closer to six than thirty-five, I had promise as an actor. So much so that my parents considered moving from Arkansas to Hollywood to launch my potential career. Eventually they decided against it, and though I continued to have success in elementary and middle school, high school was far different. I took the first acting class I could, of course, and did my usual exceptional job, looking forward confidently to joining my school's theatre company. The unwritten rule was that anyone who did well in Mr. Questor's introductory acting class automatically got accepted into Theatre Company.
Imagine my shock and outrage then, when I was denied, due to Student Council politics I do not feel much like going into at this point. Suffice it to say that after that, my thespian ambitions were everafter thwarted. A few tryouts as an undergraduate, sure, when I could get up the nerve to go through it. Always a callback, never a cast. Eventually I gave up, acknowledged that I would never be allowed back on the stage even in insignificant local productions, and consigned it to the trashcan of broken dreams.
So there I sat in that lobby, with those volatile, conflicting emotions in me, and overall love, love, love for her still setting fire to my veins. It was hopeless, impossibly so. After all, as I've said before, I was permanently trapped in the frozen ice block of brotherfriend zone, which is a far more confining space than the ordinary friend zone, which chance and a well-timed blast from the breath of a Destiny Dragon can melt and permit the previously stuck would-be paramour to prance through Paradise's pristine meadows. And yet still, as we talked that first night, in the hours before that ill-fated Snorebomb, I found myself thinking how kissable her lips looked and how, were the situation not what it was, I might have had the daring to dart forth and meet mouth with mouth, my all-over ache assuaged by accomplishment of physical contact.
But I could not do so, and would never do so. I knew too well the futility of such a gesture.
The next morning, she headed to the park, her later flight affording the hours to while away there that had I the day before. She thanked me for coming with her, hugged me, and walked away, towards the bus, while I slowly trekked the opposite direction back to the lobby to await my shuttle, letting the first tears fall. Regardless of everything else, I knew happiness when I was with her - genuine, real happiness, and every time I left her, I felt my heart breaking all over again, because I always feared that it would be the last time. Each time, I wanted to turn right around and run back to her, throwing away whatever half-life I had wherever I lived then to just be with her and have her close. God! I hated to leave her and will hate still, even in my dying hour, to leave the same Earth on which she resides, even if continents and oceans were to divide us rather than the six hours that do now.
She received an offer to join the company, but after long thought, decided it was better for her growing family to stay put and simply continue her accomplished community theatre career while pursuing greater ambitions for her day job.
But for whatever reason, since that weekend, our conversations have been scant - once every three or four months if that - and the brief, stilted variety common to people who have no real connection with one another. Worse still, I knew it when I arrived home from that trip, as I wept for a good three hours before falling into a deathlike twenty hour slumber, the tears still glistening on my cheeks. I do not pretend to know the source of my hyper-awareness, especially since there was no logical cause, but I have always been able to predict the flashpoints of ruin on the ever descending tumble of my pathetic occupancy of space and time.