Heart of Gold / A Burning Shape

Blair was co-captain of the swim team and built like it. He was tall and pale and kept his electric white hair buzzed impossibly close to his scalp, this marble-carved, hyper-efficient human specimen. I mostly knew him as my friend Matt’s roommate, the guy who’d spend the whole party smoking in the attic but only become more articulate, somehow, as the night went on. The guy who’d make sly little digs at my then-boyfriend who treated me badly, pointing out the things our friends were all a bit too keen to ignore. When Blair was in the room, there was no getting away with anything. He’d say exactly what was going on, point out when someone was being disingenuous or rude—all with this little smirk. It made my breath catch in my throat, and he knew it.

Art History class was where it really popped off. Blair and I were the only ones there out for more than an easy A. We’d monopolize the room, our classmates just casualties in our sexual-tension-fueled intellectual battle to the death over nothing. What was there to debate in Art History? I don’t remember the details, just wanting to make him sweat. I’d walk in every day with my latte and my music blaring and plop down next to him with a flourish, somehow convinced my theatrics would get his attention, or make me look cool. But we didn’t speak much outside of class discussions. Our rapport didn’t translate well to that kind of accessible small talk. On Fridays I’d ask him if he’d be at the house later, and almost always he’d say yeah, he would.

I liked sitting on their living room floor. This specific spot on the carpet right in front of the couch. Both roommates would make fun of me. There was almost always room for me elsewhere, but the floor was my spot. Every weekend I’d kick my shoes off and squat behind the coffee table, and Blair would be behind me on the couch, smoking a bowl, saying, “Ah shit, there she goes, right to her spot.” It made me feel cute, like I’d been noticed.

When the nights wound down, we’d triangulate with music. Matt liked synth pop. Blair liked hip-hop. He had this almost-neurotic obsession with rappers as a concept, like an anthropological fascination with them. When it was my turn, I’d put on anything I thought wouldn’t bore them. YouTube video after YouTube video on Matt’s PS4 as the group dropped like flies. There’d be a standoff at the end, with Blair and I fighting sleep in the darkened living room, hoping to squeeze in one more video, trying to one-up each other with our next entry in the queue. Once he played “Sweater Weather” by The Neighbourhood, which he discovered and then instantly filed away as something I’d probably like. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d already heard the song so many times before—and yes, enjoyed it. I just stared ahead and listened, reacting every so often to give the impression of naïve, virgin ears. Peppering my little oohs and ahhs over my boyfriend’s drunken snoring beside me on the pull-out as Blair’s eyes met mine in the blue glow of the TV. One night, neither of us could sleep, and he scurried off into the kitchen at 3 AM to make the two of us tater tots from scratch.

Things got weird with Blair and I, but never too weird. They got heavier, but never really heavy. Blair knew how to toe the line with his comments. There was at least one about my ass while I sat crouched in front of him on the living room floor. Once, he speculated that I talk so much I probably wouldn’t even shut up during sex. Like he’d been imagining. When he said these things I didn’t know how to react, regressing to the confused, hot pseudo-rage of my younger self being teased by the jocks at my middle school. No, stop, you’re being so gross! stop but don’t stop! saying all of this is just something I have to do for some reason! Protesting too much, all the time. Thinking back, I wonder if everyone could feel the plain white heat under all that disavowal. Matt, the rest of our friends—maybe even my boyfriend, though he never minded when it came to this or much of anything else. Maybe I looked like an ass, being so publicly a part of what was between us. But what right did they have to judge? I’d spent years wasting away, utterly deprived, and suddenly, here it was: white-hot buzzcut nourishment.

Now, at 26, I know that Blair thought I was pretty. But at 22, I didn’t understand this, wasn’t used to the kind of attention he would give me. I would keep myself up at night trying to parse his comments and ascertain the vibe of our conversations, trying to figure out if he had a real interest in me or if I was just a friend of a friend. If there was a respect there, or I was a kind of oddity. The other guys I knew were so upfront about their interest in people, and especially their attraction. They had no ability to restrain themselves whenever there was someone hot in a movie we were watching, or a name came up of some girl they’d met back in high school or at a party. Blair didn’t seem to share this attitude. I went to several parties with Blair and watched several movies with beautiful women and never witnessed a single awooga, even in jest. His occasional comments were the extent of it, always half-joking and reserved only for me. Other girls read him as pretentious and cold, this sexless robot. I understood what they saw but didn’t see it.

Toward the end of the semester, Blair and I were up late one night after an evening of our usual tricks. Normally when the music ran dry, we watched this YouTube series where 2 Chainz tried out ridiculously expensive things to see if they were actually worth the money, like $95 burgers and gold-flecked weed. But this time, Blair had different fare in mind. He must have made some introduction, but I can’t recall it. I just remember him turning on this specific version of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” where he was live on stage. I think it was an early version, like maybe he was playing it live for the first time. A short clip of banter between Neil and the audience as he rifled through his pocket full of harmonicas all tuned to different keys. Then it began, and we sat and listened.

That’s all that happened: we sat and listened.

Maybe you just had to be there. I’m sure that’s also what everyone in that audience would have said if you went up to them and asked them how it felt to hear “Heart of Gold” performed live for the very first time in the 70s. They would shake their heads at you, the way oldheads always do when you talk to them about the music that came out back then, like you look so pathetic trying to siphon your own meaning and retcon yourself into their lives. It’s not going to seem novel, the way I describe it. We all know how it feels to get to know someone. I picture a flower bud opening, fanning itself out in the dead of night for no witness. He had opened up to me and I felt chosen. Special. Even now, I wonder what it meant for him to play that song that night. We didn’t talk about it, and it’s likely he doesn’t remember, not the way I do. Enraptured by him enraptured by the screen, I looked through his skin at this well of deep pain. Or if not necessarily pain, then loneliness. Or if not necessarily loneliness, then a need to be understood. A burning shape desperate to be filled. My eyes wandered to the slumped silhouette of my boyfriend, who’d passed out drunk on the couch earlier in the night, and I understood then why this ache felt so familiar.

I didn’t do anything I wasn’t supposed to do. We didn’t stare into each other’s eyes over a long silence and stumble to his bed in a ball of desperate incoherence. We watched a few more videos and then I guess we each went to sleep. In the morning, Blair got up for swim practice, and I pretended to be asleep as I listened to his footsteps from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen and out the front door. Then I woke up again and it was just my boyfriend and everyone else. The space where Blair had sat and unfurled for me just hours before was bare. Not a shred of evidence, though I half-expected some part of him to be left coiled there like the skin of a snake.

I thought about him in the shower—not in that way, but about what he’d given me that night, something more special than the obvious. It wasn’t the first time someone had cracked in front of me, but it had always been violent. Chipping away for months, then guilt once I’d relished that first glimpse of the soft, pink middle. What had happened with “Heart of Gold” was voluntary and therefore new. I had softened something in my hands without any force and felt, finally, powerful and worth loving. As for me, I didn’t know what I’d do had the roles been reversed. I had no skin, no well to expose. I just milled around, this naked wound whimpering and leaking with no discernment. Every song was “Heart of Gold,” every touch a 10, every night a full moon. I often felt I had nothing to give anyone.

Once I dried off it was back to real life, the friends, the boyfriend, the grey static blah of Everyone Else. Getting dunked on for taking too long to get ready and needing to do my hair and my makeup. Sitting at brunch while the guys drooled over girls who’d been given time to do their makeup and hair that day. Whatever else came with being the Token Girl of that group, a handful of debuffs I try my best not to remember these days. We went to the liquor store and picked up a few more bottles for that night. In my boyfriend’s car, I was designated Passenger Seat DJ but I felt drained of my usual inspiration to play the right thing at the right time, to create some kind of moment. None of the songs were “Heart of Gold,” and I couldn’t play it there in the car with everyone while they touched and tarnished it.

I think part of me knew that “Heart of Gold” would be the climax for Blair and me. The semester was ending, and when it did I’d be carted back to my hometown and he’d to stay finish out the last quarter of his English degree. I had no idea what was coming except that friendships—and whatever this was—would be tested. A vague understanding that new phases would take hold, and these phases would point away from each other, and parties would end. And texts would just trail off limply and months later, on a random Tuesday, you’d realize they had.

I once saw this art series where relationships were represented by two lines that intersected or drew apart. One set of parallel lines—two people who would never really know each other. There was one where the lines both branched outward from a single point of origin, people who knew each other once, and then drifted. Two braided strands meant to represent the bond between a human and a dog, the dog’s line much shorter.

The one that was the saddest and most interesting was the one where two lines started at entirely different points, intersected, then kept going, like an X. Maybe it’s because it’s 1 AM but even now, it hurts to think about. There’s no rule stating how fast things move, whether that intersection lasts a decade or a few months or a one-night stand. Maybe in the space of that little dot something big and great is built and babies are born and there are apartments with shoes intermingled and piled by the doors. But still, all you have is that dot. Ahead of you, the lines keep going for god knows how long. And the lines are so much longer relative to the point where you’re standing. Might as well be forever.

A fragmented memory of Matt trying to get me on a fitness kick. Marching me around the weight room in the gym. The squat bar was right in front of the window overlooking the pool where Blair practiced. He was there that day, and according to Matt, he looked up.

Inviting Blair to my senior thesis reading in the campus chapel. There was a lot going on that day. My parents were meeting my boyfriend’s for the first time and there was a rainstorm and two bouquets of flowers. I was concerned about reading raunchy poems in a church in front of adults who might judge me, and not reading too slow, and my flattering intro. I don’t even remember if he came.

A couple texts here and there through the next year. He was thinking of law school and I worked for a law firm. I was thinking of breaking up with my boyfriend, then did it—badly. No more Token Girl, no more dudes and their parties. When the texts trailed off, so did Blair’s. I always wondered what he’d heard about what I’d done and how I was doing. I wondered what they told him.

A dream I had once, in that time, about Blair in the suburbs. Meeting his family for dinner. His older sister, warm and teacherly with bleached teeth, watched me jealously. His parents were impressed. On the couch downstairs I laid on his shoulder but didn’t know why. The dream honored the nature of us and the lack of closure. We had a weird half of a conversation about how I want to do this but am I a bad person? He apologized and took out his penis but it was not right. It was red and cartoon-looking. It seemed to signal that, hey, this is not actually what you want, this is what you think you want because this is what you think you’re supposed to do when you feel close to people. You’re just drooling after a bell. I woke up feeling fucked.

This happened years ago. I feel stifled sometimes by the way people think about writing and memory. Like either I’m 13 or my brain is wired wrong. If you write about something it must have happened exactly that way and it must be all you think about, so important to you that you recite it to yourself every night before going to bed, you sit on the floor of the shower and cry about it. You think about these things because you’re stunted and you care too much about what people thought of you in high school or about which people didn’t want to fuck you or whatever. Do people believe that? I read my old diaries a lot—it’s centering to feel the sense of narrative, that you are the culmination of a bunch of weird encounters. That you’re the line, not the little dot. People scare each other out of getting tattoos of names or song lyrics because there’s a chance they might change as people and their tattoos will stop making sense. But then, the tattoo signifies a time where you loved something enough to put it on you permanently. It just becomes more complex, then. I never saw the problem.

I do still, sometimes, put on “Heart of Gold” and think about that night. It’s not obsession though. I don’t pine. There’s less to pore over now. The well I saw in Blair has shown up a few times since then, in other people, in the dark and on drugs and in empty parking lots, eating take-out tacos. I feel suspicious that it has more to do with me than them, the tail wagging the dog a bit. It means there could be love, and sometimes there is. Two lines cross and diverge. Two lines hear “Heart of Gold” in the 2 AM light. Two lines cross and wrap around each other over and over and over. Two lines cross, and in the center, a burning shape.