Late night musings on love, longing, etc.

It’s 2:30 in the morning, and the world is still-or at least my little sliver of New Jersey suburbia is. That is, the lights are off, the neighbors are quiet, and my Facechat buddy list is depressingly bare. You Say Party! We Say Die! is blaring from the iMac speakers, and it’s a wonder that it hasn’t penetrated the closed doors down the hall. A couple of hours ago my friend was texting me while waiting for her parents to go to sleep so she could sneak out-cliche teenage shenanigans, but a small part of me envied her. No, I had no desire to see anyone; I prefer the night as a solitary time. Maybe it’s just that I don’t get in trouble often enough. Or maybe it’s because she’s meeting a boy. If I was to believe pop culture (and it seems as reliable as anything else these days), young love is the most tragic thing out there. Maybe it’s true. I could say I’ve had my share of relationships gone awry, but I haven’t-it has just been one relationship, one girl, over and over again. Yes, that one girl. My heart was broken and sewn together enough times during the relationship, but the aftermath was what made me lose faith in people for a long while. It’s amazing how, even when you reach out to someone, they can remain willing to live in their little cocoon, to say what they want about a person they cared about so much. Her actions lacked a shred of humanity. I’ve never before faced words, as ruthless and cruel as they may be, that split me in two. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t still have any feelings for her at all. But I knew that it would take someone new for me to ever really be over her, to just stop caring. Then came…well, the girl that would help me get over her. Maybe the timing was coincidental and she is just another girl. Maybe there really is something special about this girl, something that I can’t put my finger on. I psychoanalyze myself too much to ever find a real answer. Maybe I didn’t like her at all, just responded to the interest she was so clearly showing, the Facebook comments and smiles across the room and text messages without anything to say. Maybe it was all an accident of fate. But she was that girl. And as we all now, distance kills. Cell phones cannot compare to a late night heart-to-heart across the chipped linoleum table of a New Jersey diner. An emoticon is not and will never be a shared smile, hands clasped and eyes locked. And God knows that nothing compares to a kiss. As many kind word as may be shared, as many butterflies as may flutter, there is nothing like the electric current of anticipation running through your body before a kiss, the constant concerns and fears as you tell yourself to let go and enjoy it while you know she is standing across from you, inches from your face, wondering why the hell you won’t just finish the job and join yourself to her, place your arm around her back and your hand roughly in her hair and your lips to hers and ignite her with passion. But the currents die with the equivalent of a 59 minutes car ride, according to Mapquest and my Physics teacher, and any anticipation just doesn’t seem so pressing when I have time to craft the perfect text message, to decide which smiley face she would like best. No, distance is not for me. I want her next to me, so close that I can feel her breath on my neck, so close that I can glance up and see that she was looking at me longingly and then I can kiss her-but why bother? I know she sits at home thinking the same things. Maybe even now she’s dreaming it. Of course, that’s why we agreed to stay friends. Yes, it was tough to agree to, to not let these feelings play themselves out. But I knew that it was the right decision, and it was the one that had to be made. So she remains my friend, the one with whom I want to walk through central park and laugh and pretend to fight, to look at the stars when it gets dark and reach for her hand. Of course, that will probably never happen. Perhaps my emotions are just intensified this late at night, as I long for feeling in a world so often devoid of it. But tonight, compromise feels like the worst tragedy there is.