Dear Not-Gay Boyfriend:

It was raining, as you know, very slightly, when you walked into the place where you and your buddies have your weekly pow-wow. I was there already, having walked back and forth in the bar twice, looking in vain for you. I had already come in once and left, not having seen you and not knowing anyone else in your group. And then you walked in.

And it was raining, as you know, when we all left after 2 hours, raining harder when we left the bar en masse, when you thanked me for coming (polite as always) and we hugged awkwardly good-bye on a street corner, both tired and glad we didn't have a 9 am class (though I have a 10:30 class).

Rain is a funny thing. It can be refreshing, after a long dry spell. It can be dreary and gloomy, after days and days. It can be lulling, and it can be peaceful. It can feel like the mark of the end of things, and it can feel like the mark of something new (but mostly that feeling comes after a rain ends).

The rain to me tonight, Not-Gay Boyfriend, did not have the feeling of something new. It felt like the end of something. And the thing tonight that ended was my delirious state of unreality and infatuation with you. We were in the bar with your friends for two hours, and in those two hours, I was looking for something, something hopeful and necessary. I didn't find it.

It would have been easy to deliver that something. Holding my gaze, holding a private conversation, holding yourself in a way that intimated a particular interest in what I was saying, or merely in just my presence.

But I didn't find that something.

Maybe you're not ready. Maybe you're not interested. It sort of seemed like you were interested: we did have those two very nice meals together. You did invite me, with what seemed like genuine encouragement, to this weekly get-together of you and your friends. You even told your close friend about me and my summer in the state she'll be working in this fall.

But it was important, you see, to deliver that something tonight, there in the bar with your friends. You can see why, can't you? You're age appropriate for me -- you know (or definitely should know!) by now that you don't simply invite someone you're interested in to hang out and NOT make that gesture. For whatever reason, you failed to deliver it.

It doesn't matter what the reason is. It only matters that it didn't happen.

So the rain tonight, Not-Gay Boyfriend, marks the end of my expectations, as foolish and as delighted as they were. After we parted, I stood in the rain a couple minutes outside my dorm, finishing the cigarette I so richly deserved, humming the Etta James song that ran through my head the first couple days after you came up to me in class ("At last, my love has come around/And my lonely days are over/And life is like a song").

And then I sang quietly the song I made up a long time ago, while walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, heart-sore and determined to let go of another expectation, delirious and obsessive and painful and delightful as that was too: "And though I may have made a wish or two/On that bridge is where I lay to rest my dreams of you."

It was foolish to have expectations, but I don't apologize for them. When you've gone a couple years without feeling excited about anyone, you jump, exuberantly (and prematurely, as it turns out), at the hope of a connection with someone. Only connect! E.M. Forster cried out all through Howard's End, because connection with another human soul is the happiest and most necessary thing in life; without it, we are automatons, dry husks of movement and duty and service without the divine spark that makes existence bearable and sweet.

I know I am being melodramatic. I know that I was overly invested from the beginning, having harbored a crush that had started last year. But the rain makes people a little crazy sometimes. A little sad. A little refreshed. A little resigned. And when it ends, we shoulder our daily burden of life with the comforts that we already had, hoping that they'll stretch out soon enough to fill the space where hope lay, if only for a little while.

In friendship and solidarity,
hk