On my future, or something?

“Do we really have to walk all the way?” J asks me this with giant blue eyes and a pout the size of a toddler’s pout when he really doesn’t want to do something their mother tells them to. I tell him to. He sits there sulking and I explain walking to the tram stop isn’t really that far, like he doesn’t know that himself. He’s been a student in Amsterdam a year longer than me. He continues to sulk. My conversation drifts off with interruptions from Y and N the Swedish majors. It’s the first get-together of the academic year and I can’t believe I’m saying this after having known them for just a year, but I’m so happy to see Y and N again. Also Mn the Norwegian major and her Norwegian boyfriend C, who left earlier because none of us had any idea what to talk with him about.

“But,” I suddenly remember. “They have broccoli pizzas!”

J gets excited like the kid he sometimes is and grabs my upper arm to cuddle it. Y, N and V the Dutch major are all surprised, because obviously he doesn’t normally act like that. I grin and tell him he should have let me finish before.

*

We’re on our way to our favourite Italian restaurant, as J jumps into a puddle with all his height and weight into it. I get wet and there’s a leaf stuck on my jeans. Y is shocked, as she is often, and N doesn’t know what to make of it. As I get over my own surprise, I chase J down the street and try to get a hold of him. He holds my wrists and is stronger than me, as all boys are. “Dammit, you’re way too strong,” I say, having never tried to attack him before. “I love you too,” he answers, and has me in a hug before I get out of my attack-mood.

*

“I no longer go on holidays with my parents.” I tend to forget I get uncomfortable right after bringing up my parents. Or anything about my giant family.
“I only go on holidays with my mother anymore.”

He regularly rebuilds his mothers car because it used to be his fathers car. “Mijn dooie pappa,” he said, not perfectly translatable to “my dead dad”. I’m not used to people talking about their dead parents like this, before, usually it wasn’t talked about at all. He says he doesn’t feel like he misses anything, but the topic is about as recurring in conversation as the Foo Fighters were with L the European Studies major. It’s a weird connection, but it’s the only one I know of that makes sense in the context of this blog. His dead dad is always at the edges of his conscience, whether he admits to it or not. One day I’ll learn how to respond to this.

*

“I still want to buy an entire bottle of coke and drink all of it.” We’re on our way back to the railway station, N, J and me having to take the same train.

“There’s a AH to go on Amsterdam Central,” I answer.

“Yeah. I probably wouldn’t go home and finish phonology though.” He told me he’d started on phonology on Monday morning, but in fact it turned out he hadn’t really done anything for it yet.

“You’d go home, drink your coke, and listen to Beatsteaks or something.”

Silence. “Why do you know me so well?”

*

When did this shift happen. At home, there’s a one-sentence message on my Facebook wall from M the Meds major. A few days ago she posted pictures of some ‘weekend in Paris’ with her new boyfriend W. I honestly had no idea they were going on a trip to Paris. (For any Americans out there: from where I grew up, Paris is four hours by car and not much more than that by train. It sounds extravagant, but it’s really just as far away as the Dutch islands in the North Sea.)

I knew I was sliding away from M about halfway through our holidays when we were sitting at the bus stop in beautiful Bologna with our groceries and we didn’t have any conversation for more than an hour (the bus came once every two hours) because she was listening to her mp3 player. I didn’t know I was sliding away from her towards J.

Or perhaps I did. But I didn’t realise exactly how this would happen. I thought my sliding away from M would take years, and my sliding towards J had nothing really to do with that. But I guess it’s true what my mother told me all along, we all get different friends once we’re in our separate universities in our separate cities. What I hope for us is that there won’t be any fuss. I’m done with fuss, was done with fuss at fifteen. Was done with fuss when I doubted whether I should help E the General Linguistics major with picking up her headphones as we walked out of the same tram to our respective classes. She was wearing heels. She also has a five-year relationship, so that ship is pretty much sailed.

It was somewhere between the puddle incident and realising nobody else knew who his girlfriend was (although they all know her) I understood exactly what spot J is beginning to take up in my life. And it’s not like it would be with a girl – I don’t spell everything out that happens to me. I used to spell everything out to M the Meds major I used to be able to talk about and she used to listen patiently and ask perceptive questions. But I’ve managed to create what I felt like I missed out on since leaving primary school: a ‘boy-girl’ friendship that’s more of a ‘boy-boy’ friendship. And then for a very big part it’s also not, because I’m pretty sure that if any two boys would be like he is with his female friends it would be considered very gay.

How do I explain this?

*

“I hate phonetics. I hate that woman and I hate the homework and I hate how much time I spend on failing it.”

“Yup. But it’s going to be alright,” he says.

“That’s your answer to everything,” I mutter unnapreciatively.

“If you drop the course, you can drink coffee with  me on Wednesday afternoons.”

I throw him a look. “No, that’s a great reason.”

“Want a hug?” He’s as tall as me, his tiny not naturally blonde curls against my cheek. I want so badly for us to be like this in decades to come. I want him to be a phone call away when I have my first child. Or when I am freaking out about what to pack to some other continent to bring my first child home. Whichever of those options, that have always both been present in my mind, is the one that is going to happen. I will call (ordered by likelihood of him living there) Denmark, or Norway, or Holland, or Germany, from wherever I will live then, and nervously squeak through a phone that I will no longer be slightly afraid of using. I’m too young to envision this, well screw that, I’m envisioning it as we speak.

*

On the other end of the line, a scooter drives by. “What were the chapters we had to read? ‘Cause I had to work until now.” I imagine him standing outside ‘the big blue box’ at ten pm, the Ikea in a different city either of us lives in, in a different world from me. With my current workload, I couldn’t get a job. It would be G Without A Life. Sometimes, I feel like it leaves J without a life as well.

Two hours later, my phone accidentally calls him because he’s the last incoming call and I’m not altogether accustomed to my touch screen yet. “Are you done with phonology yet? I’m not, because I got home and made dinner at eleven, and then L called because she’d spilled water over her laptop, and now we’re here.” I tell him I’m done with phonology, and I didn’t mean to call him, but I was just getting into bed. “Excuse accepted. Good night!”

*

“Do you want more chocolate?”
“I’m nauseous.”
“But if I eat all this I’ll get nauseous too.”

We’re in ‘the bear pit’ in our university building. Above us are the stairs to the first and second floor hovering in mid-air, stairs that can take you no further, so from the second floor up you always have to take a different flight or one of the many stairs that just go one floor up. It’s really the closest you can get to studying in Hogwarts. (Except for that one girl who used to major in English and Norwegian and is now in Oxford. But nothing beats Oxford in anything.) Getting to the sixth floor without getting lost is a menace, which is why we have our wooden elevators with electrical box ladies telling you on which floor you’ve landed. Most of the time when I’m looking for someplace I haven’t been before, I do it by trial and error and a general sense of where I might be at that time. And don’t get me started on getting to the entrance of the library on the first floor when you’re already on the first floor, but on the wrong side of the building – you will have to go either one floor up or one floor down before getting anywhere closer to your destination.

I’m lying on my side, my monthly headache throbbing, and accept a tiny piece of chocolate. I’ve heard that caffeine can bring about headaches, and I already have a monthly migraine attack, so I stopped drinking coke and reserve tea for the times when I really can’t go without it any longer. (Or when I’m freezing to the bone.) But chocolate, this time, is allowed. Both of us just flunked a phonology test.

Just for a second I close my eyes and before I know it, his face is all up in mine, his cheek against mine. I don’t immediately sense the importance of the moment, but I understand it now. M was always about tough love, and in the end, she thought many things I did or liked laughable. And J is a boy which, my short-lasting romance with L taught me, is still a tricky gender to be around, to get close to, to raise expectations with for yourself. (To be clear: it really was me who expected me to behave a certain way around L. He was just a nice guy.) The thing about J is that I don’t have to raise expectations for myself with him. I’m just gonna be me, and he’s just gonna be him, and he’s gonna be all physical, but there’s no bigger meaning to it. Well okay, deep breath, I’m gonna say it: it’s not sexual. His girlfriend L is doing her semester in Norway and he texts and e-mails her constantly. The thought he might ever become ‘more than friends’ is ridiculous, and something I’m probably only adding because in my old circle of friends in Maastricht, I can’t mention any boy more often than once before they ask me if I’m interested in them. It’s as ridiculous an assumption as that I might think of J this way. (And just because all the signs are pointing in this direction anyway, let me tell you that as I’m typing this, it’s been seven weeks since I saw any of them in Maastricht and I don’t really miss them.)

J is the kind of person who hugs everybody. Well, everybody female. I don’t think I know any boys he is good friends with, although I’m sure there must be a couple, it seems to be some alternative straight girls and an enviable amount of gay girls. Because of his ADD, he is about the most impulsive person I know, and that kind of eliminates any borders he might have on the cuddling-front. All the borders I have. That’s good. More importantly, it’s safe.

Because of the time of night I’m writing this, I’m keen to elaborate, about Mat, whom I lost, about M the Meds major, whom I am almost consciously cutting out of my life, about all kinds of things. But I won’t. L said it made sense if I didn’t trust anyone ‘anymore’, like I had trusted anyone before it happened, which is something he of course couldn’t know. Of course, that was a different kind of distrust; I was and still am the kind of person who wants to solve everything by herself.

Sobutanyway – I also stopped trusting myself. And I need people like J who are just there without further explanations to make me able to rebuild the trust I used to have in myself.

When we get out of the building and he’s off to a different one for a class I already passed, and he’s taking for the third time, he lays his head on my shoulder. As he sighs and we stand there side by side, I ruffle his hair. Note that the times I’ve spontaneously hugged a friend, ever,  can probably be counted on two hands. Most of my friends are girls, and before I knew I was gay I was uncomfortable around them for reasons unclear. After I figured it out, I was always worried somehow they would find it uncomfortable, or they would think I meant something different, even though they clearly are the most awesome friends anyone could have and it was only ever really me who thought those things. I wonder if I’m growing, as a person.

“Okej hej!” he says, and we split directions. I wonder how people see us.

*

So at what time do you have class tomorrow? I text sometime past midnight. He will still be up. Just found out via Facebook L has a girlfriend, and because his ex was always his ex, even still in June of this year, I’m the meaningless nothing in between the ex and the new girlfriend. I don’t feel angry or betrayed or whatever, not really. I mean, I’ve felt more angry and more betrayed with other people in the past.

I know this is not it and I know I really don’t care about how he specifically has a new girlfriend. It is just how he was the first person who I ever let get close to me, so that’s why this is still mildly important in my mind. That’s a simple fact of life. What I do feel angry about is that I know I’m not ready for that. I’m not ready to get all tangled up in someone. It’s not easy for me to let my guard down, and when I do, it’s not easy for me to let go, even though on the outside it might seem like you’re miles away from where my mind and heart are. It’s a big step, so with L, it was a big step to even start thinking about letting my guard down, and although I have no regrets about it, my heart is still mending. I wish I was one of those guys who always breathe ‘I’m not in it for the long run’ so I could live a little while I’m mending, but alas, I actually do fall for people.

We (J and me, that is, I don’t ever see L anymore and have no intention of doing so ever again in my life, ever! – you get the point) arrange for lunch the next day, creating for both of us a reason to attend class (I’ve been sloppy on the Swedish Language Acquisition 1 & 3 front) and he is all hugs and “Yes, but everything will be alright”, and conversation like it is with boys when you don’t try to make it complicated. Girl conversation is a lot about stories that have feelings in them. Boy conversation is simple and neat, like a freshly made bed. It clears the clutter in my mind.

*

“Han är väl snygg, tror du det inte också?” This is the Swedish translation of what J said in Danish about the guy behind the counter at the pasta place at Amsterdam Central. It is how I remember it, because my mind renders everything Danish or Norwegian into Swedish. He’s kind of cute, don’t you agree? Literally. I turn my head, smile, and think, yay for straight men who say other men are cute.

*

And there we were, in the same two seats we were the Friday before, and the Friday before that. And the Wednesdays in between. And only a few more weeks to go, because he’s not taking the class that comes after the midterm week. I’m not sure what the label of ‘best friend’ means at our age. Me nineteen, him twenty-two. I’d recently drawn the conclusion it was possible to have several. It’s a world of mystery for me. I’m no longer sure I want to throw around words like that.

He puts his ‘Iceland gloves’ into his bag. Green, black, pink. I put my new H&M gloves in my bag. Blue. It’s too early for my Iceland gloves (dark grey, black, light grey), they’re too warm. In fact, it’s too early for gloves altogether, in October. Both of us know that.

We’re ready. Phonology, bring it on.

*

I’m ready. World, bring it on.