The Best Boyfriend I Never Dated

Never underestimate the joy in dating someone who doesn't speak English.  Especially if you don't speak their language very well.  You rely on gestures, mostly speak in the present tense, intonation becomes musical and when referring to complicated concepts you try to choose definitions as if you were looking up a word in a children's dictionary.  You opt for simple, direct and the desire for clarity.  As if just to be understood is the goal more than hoping to be thought of as smart and witty.  And really isn't this more important in matters of the heart? 

I would argue some of the best practice I have had with my own heart has not been with the men I've dated, but boyfriends I never even tried dating.  I am lucky that I have had some great male role models.  My brother, who once took me to school as his show and tell, placed me on top of a chair and asked me questions in front of his second grade class.  My father has been the one person I will call from a locked bathroom from any location, in any existential state.  Recently my closest best non-dating boyfriend and I play a game called first text rodeo, where we see who can send hellos to each other the earliest.  Every morning.  Every morning I am lucky to be reminded that even though I am not married, I still love men.

My first non-dating boyfriend, Art Chiaravalli, hails from a family that comes from the same Italian village as Ovid.  Italian heritage with poetic sensibilities with a soul all Motown is a good way to describe Art, who was born in East Lansing, Michigan.  But let's get something straight from the beginning: Art and I never kissed.  But what we did do was--wrote music for our band called Beige is the Color of Love circa 1995, fed homeless people in our dorm room in bitter Ann Arbor winters, wrote letters to each other when you used stamps, made a series of movies based on our childhood fantasies, crashed fraternity parties by slipping in Beastie Boys and danced to Ill Communication as if we were waltzing.  We never once considered we weren't in love.  But we never even considered kissing.  Seriously, Art was the best boyfriend I never dated.

I am hoping most of you have an Art in your lives--someone you once met at tennis camp, young and awkward, where you a tween spent more time staring at the stronger more athletic types playing soccer between the fence while you and Art volleyed a tennis ball--making each other laugh so hard you had to stop.  Too shy at the end of the week to exchange phone numbers or addresses, you escaped the awkward good-bye by running away to your respective mini-vans.  Years later, you found yourself in a college poetry class and the kid across from you wearing an East Lansing High School tennis sweatshirt looked slightly familiar.  Weeks passed and both of you waiting outside Professor Goldstein's office, when you finally introduced yourself, "Hey, I'm Emily. I think we're in Poetry 210 together?" Suddenly, you both saw who each other really was--no longer short haired gamine in all black and the other no longer small chested, argumentative with constant open book syndrome, but somehow in each of you, the pre-teen surfaced.  You were just Art and Emily.  For the rest of your college career, you were simply this each other, really young and really in love.

Sure, you might be wondering if I ever searched for Art.  The early years post-college I was in Europe and Art was in religion.  We wrote letters a bit, but we faded away, time passed and recently, I did look Art up.  Thanks to the google I found him, his wife and their six children in middle of Michigan where Art teaches high school English and loves it.  When reading about his life and family on his school's website, I felt so proud, so happy.  Really, if I were to try to explain this to someone in Swedish, I would gesture with my hands around my heart showing it grew, I would smile broadly while nodding, I would say so happy for good friend.  And I would mean it.

Sometimes we want our hearts to be a linear story.  No, truth be known, many times I want my heart to be linear as if sadness and heartache could be cashed in for happiness and love when we find it.  Our hearts are just some cards we keep shuffling, keep gambling away on hope and luck.  But like my boy friend I am currently not dating whose arms are covered in tattoos told me while I was crying in a park late last summer, "Regret....regret Emily?" while rolling up his sleeves to point out an almost nude inked nurse holding a needle in her hand, "this is regret, Emily. This is what regret looks like."  Did I tell you who much I adore him?

And really, it's the practice of loving what we cannot have or hold which I feel prepares us for knowing how to finally keep love.  The homeless dog you find, but later the owners come to claim, the boy you sit next to on an airplane who tells you about his love of the clarinet, the pilot who gives you a ride through a snowstorm in a rented Buick, the skinny boy in graduate school whose father is a plumber and teaches you more about line breaks than anyone else and who eats plate after plate of enchiladas you made, dropping his fork he puts both palms up to the sky and claims your food from some God. These are the men you lean into.  These are also the men you let go because they are not yours to have, not yours to keep.  You don't date them.  Not because you don't love them, but because you learn about love from them.  And you also learn how to let them go.  And maybe it is the letting go that allows you to see them, really see them as they are as men in themselves and not in reflection of you. 

This poem is the first poem I ever published.  I wrote this poem in honor for another boy I never dated, Stevie Flowers.  He's in the Art category of awkward turned awe-inspiring.  I heard through friends that Stevie is a pilot, has a family and I would imagine be someone who would drive a young girl safely home in a snow storm.  So if you have any Arts or Stevies in your lives, give them thanks.  Take them to a movie.  Bake them cookies.  For the ones who send you hellos from the other side of town are as important to your silver lining, as the ones you want to roll over next to day after day.  And thankfully, the best boyfriends never dated help you learn how to rewrite your own playbook of a heart when you don't want to even pick up a pen.

Enjoy.

In the Public Garden

Every gym class, Stevie Flowers pissed

his corduroys. He hated dodge ball,

stood in the corner or hid

from the bigger boys who broke

anything or anyone small.

He read Make Way For Ducklings,

sat on his knees with Buddha’s

slow smile. I knew even then

he would be the one who loved me.

I still remember the metallic

taste of the bat that summer

we played softball. He cupped my face

while my nose bled, told me later 

he’d tape my glasses.

But later it was others who stood

outside my window, holding

a book of Yeats, fly open

with a half drunk grin.

It’s always a simple request

at first.

In the Boston Commons, I pause

at the ducklings in bronze, still

like the boy who read to me.

Somewhere there’s a man

I’d never think to run from.