Heartstrings

He never kissed me.

I met him in a coffee shop, the year I moved back to California.They had hired me to be live music for Friday night, but no one wanted to be in this coffee shop when the brewery next door had just released a whole slew of new porters and stouts. He was walking toward the brewery, stopped when he noticed the music was live and walked inside. He stayed for my entire set.

He brought me home that night. I was enamored by his Bob Dylan musicality and his James Dean attitude. He played all sorts of instruments himself, and there were a few moments over the years of our friendship where we’d play and sing together and it would feel perfect, at least to me.

“Let’s go to the desert,” he said one day, as we lay awake on the floor of his apartment after an evening of dancing with and exploring one another’s bodies. “Let’s go to Mexico. Let’s go to Mexico today,” he said to me.

“Okay,” I said and I excused myself so I could head home and look for my passport. I showered and straightened my hair and put on makeup and re-did my lipstick three times until I got it just right. He asked me on a trip. Maybe I wasn’t just the girl he called in the late evenings, just a girl he kept around so that night wasn’t so lonely.

It started to rain. He called and said he didn’t want to ride his motorcycle in the rain, but how about we meet at the Yellow Deli and have lunch?

Hours pass. He called again and said the rain is pouring too hard, he doesn’t think he can even make it to the Deli but how about I come down there?

I said no.

That’s the way it was with him. He was endlessly disappointing and I was so caught up in what it might be like to be loved by him.

“Why don’t you ever kiss me?” I asked once, as we both lay naked in his bed.
“It’s too intimate,” he said, and he fell asleep, turned away from me.