I met Ned, my first major high school crush, in my freshman English class. Ned was tall and funny and athletic, and our palms fit together perfectly when we shook hands, which I thought at the time was a divine marker of our common destiny. Ned had a best friend, Jared. Jared was funny, too, but he was also many things that Ned was not: though not diminutive, he was shorter than his best friend; not into sports; musical; sensitive; incredibly smart; and kind. Whereas Ned barely made it out of high school alive after being on the losing end of substance addiction and a drug-related, near-fatal car crash, Jared moved to New York to study film and become a director. You can guess which one I still think about as the mythical One That Got Away.
Of course, I don’t know that Jared and I would’ve been any good together. In addition to his many charms, he swore like a sailor, and I could never have brought him home to my very proper, God-fearing mother. And we never dated—he never asked and I wasn’t really allowed to, anyway, so I have no purely romantic memories of him. But the idea of him—that’s what lost love really is, for me, an enticing, bittersweet idea—continues to fascinate me, even twelve years after we last saw each other. When all else fails in life, when the life you’re living is not the one you’d like to be, it is comforting to believe that somewhere out there is your destiny. And hopefully he isn’t married (to the wrong girl, of course), and he’s living his dreams and would inspire you to find yours, if you were together.
Potentially embarrassing disclosure: I tried to contact Jared, about four or five years ago, using that unreliable friend of modern love, the internet. I found an e-mail address that may or may not have been active—the e-mail I sent wasn’t returned by the e-mail gatekeepers, but it also wasn’t answered. So of course I hoped that it did not arrive safe and sound only to go ignored by the One. I was fresh out of law school and freshly disillusioned by the path I’d chosen, and wishing I’d been courageous enough to pursue my creative instincts, as Jared had. And I think that’s what I told him. In retrospect, I’m not sure how flattering that would be to hear, or how attractive. “Hi! I’m lost. Can you help find me?” Maybe for a man with dubious motives that would have been an attractive offer. But for anyone who knows where he is and where he wants to go, the idea of towing someone else’s lifeboat must not sound particularly appealing.
Despite all this--despite knowing that he might be unavailable, that he might still be completely wrong for me in some important ways, that he may have already silently rejected me, I still think about him. He is my enduring, enticing myth.
