Once upon a time, I had a crush on an altar boy. I used to go to Saturday evening mass just because he was there, and then we’d head out in a noisy, happy gang to do whatever it is teenagers do on a Saturday night. In fact, he was the boyfriend of a good friend of mine. They were “the” couple in our high school, the inseperable ones, the ones who were together so often that you really started to think of them as a single entity.<\/p>\n
I’d known him since grade school, but it wasn’t until half way through high school that our social circles started to intersect regularly. We became friends, and soon the three of us — he, his girlfriend, and I — were spending a lot of time together. One March Break his girlfriend went off to Florida and he and I spent the whole week together, not quite bold enough to do more than hold hands discreetly when we knew no-one was looking, but there was no mistaking the mutual attraction between us. I was 16 and desperate for affection, but not desperate enough to be disloyal to my friend.<\/p>\n
She came back from Florida and I’m pretty sure she was oblivious to what had almost happened in her absence. We went back to being the Three Amigos again, but it was never as comfortably fun as it had been in the months before. I didn’t exactly pine for him, nor resent his girlfriend, but felt a kind of melancholy sadness over what I knew would never be.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later, I started seeing a boy who lived out of town. I drifted away from my friends, as often happens in high school (and for that matter, even now) when a new boyfriend comes into the picture. Our social circles still intersected, and I saw them occasionally. In fact, it was less awkward being a threesome with an invisible and out-of-town fourth than it had been before. Just a few days after graduation, though, I moved across the province to live with my new boyfriend. In the adventure of new love, I left most of my best friends behind me like discarded possessions.<\/p>\n
Through the years, I thought often of my altar boy and regretted losing touch. While I’d managed to keep in touch with the dearest of my high school friends, my altar boy seemed to drop off the map after graduation. I knew he and his girlfriend had broken up, but nobody seemed to know what had become of him. Through the years, I’d idly check online directories and alumni lists, but his name was nowhere to be found. He’d disappeared – but I never stopped wondering about him.<\/p>\n
He was, in many ways, the one that got away. I wouldn’t change the path that my life has taken for any sum of money, but he’s the one that I would wonder about, late at night, especially when things were in turmoil. What if? What if? What if I hadn’t had that ridiculously overdeveloped sense of loyalty, that long ago March Break in 1986? What if I hadn’t been so desperate for attention and affection when the new boy swooped into the picture? <\/p>\n
The fact that he disappeared so utterly and completely after high school only elevated him to nearly mythic status in my imagination. I imagined him doing some sort of foreign aid work in third-world countries, or planting trees in the Amazon rain forest, or riding his bicycle across the country to raise awareness and funds for some obscure disease. Of all my friends, he seemed the most likely to do something like that.<\/p>\n
And then one day, I found him. On Facebook. I was perusing the ‘friends’ list of another friend from the same high school social circle, looking for familiar names. (Do you do this? I scan the list, see names I recognize, and then do nothing about it. Why do I bother if I’m too shy to reach out? Facebook brings out the strangest bits of me.) When I read his name, I’m quite sure my jaw dropped open in surprise. I know for a fact my breath caught in my throat. Could it be the same person? Of course it was, but I had so elevated my altar boy to the stuff of legend that to find him in such a pedestrian place — stumbled on to in a Facebook account of all things — seemed so unlikely that at first I simply stared at his name in wonder.<\/p>\n
At first, I was so surprised to find him that I did nothing. I clicked back into Facebook a few times, just looking at his name. His icon was nondescript, a blurry photo that could have been just about anybody or – for that matter – anything. I agonized over how to make contact. Whether to make contact. Countless scenarios spun out in my imagination, not least of which would be him replying to my query saying he didn’t remember me from high school. (After all these years, it’s rather alarming how close to the surface resides that crushingly insecure fourteen-year-old girl I was.) <\/p>\n
Finally, I spent an hour crafting a two line message, imbuing it with as much friendly nonchalance as I could muster. I think I hovered with my mouse pointed to the send button for an eternity before releasing 20 years of “what if” with a single click of the mouse.<\/p>\n
For a week, nothing happened. Well, lots happened, but nothing that could have possibly met the expectations pent up in my Facebook account. Just when I was beginning to think I’d been mistaken — mortally, painfully mistaken — I got his response. <\/p>\n
We exchanged a few messages in that stilted way that comes with intimacy followed by a 20-year gap. I learned that he had a daughter, herself a teenager now, but no wife. He is a salesman, living in a middling-to-large city that I’d visited a few times. I told him that I’d married, and divorced, and remarried, and that I was happy. He never said whether he was happy, too. Our conversation petered out after just a few messages, with neither warmth or regret. It’s been more than a year since we made contact, and each time I see his name in my list of friends, I feel that pang of lost wonder. <\/p>\n
His ordinaryness continues to amaze me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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