Surreal.
It all just felt so surreal.
There I sat, wingman-ing it up for my friend, as she flirted and made eyes at someone I myself had made eyes at six years ago.
Like I said, surreal.
I hadn't seen him in six years. Six years! Had no idea what he was up to, other than the periodic status updates he posted on Facebook. So since the last time I'd said hi, all I really knew was that he had pizza last Friday, moved to New York in 2008, and campaigned for Obama in 2006 and maybe again this past election. I had all these questions, but instead, I sat there and made polite conversation with his friend. How was work? What do you do again? Oh, tell me about that. Another device, eh? Congratulations, how exciting for you!
I said all the appropriate things, while trying to surreptitiously eavesdrop on the other conversation going on just across the table. After all, being a psychiatrist has trained me to become really good at listening while not really listening.
After an hour or so, my friend got up to enact her exit plan. I mean, we all know how awkward these kind of set-ups can be. And we had talked about it beforehand. She had concert tickets so, at any point, she could get up and say that she needed to go home to get dressed, or rattle off a 'oh my, look at that, the traffic in LA is terrible, I better leave three hours before doors open to make sure I get there in time' while desperately running for the exit.
She stayed well past the doors opening, and it was only when her friend - already at the concert - started hammer-texting her madly to see where she was, that she was guilted into leaving.
I patted myself on the back for a successful matchmaking venture.
But that whole surreal feeling was just beginning.
I thought that that was the end of it, that we would say our goodbyes, our wayward path crossing never to happen again, but instead he wanted to chat. Wanted advice. Wanted my expert psychiatrist opinion on his love life. On what he was doing with his love life.
I learned essentially everything about him in the next few hours. How he wasn't sure he'd ever been in love before, that he was worried he wasn't capable of feeling love, that there were maybe just three girls he liked in undergrad (and yes, he told me their names), and in the midst of all this, he asked me such pointed questions too, that it made me worry he'd come across this very blog and realized that he had played such a role in my early 20s.
[Side note: I highly doubt he's read this. After all, reading someone's blog and realizing you're the subject matter would make anyone prone to awkwardness, and this boy, well, he takes the whole awkward cake. So the fact that he was even able to look me in the eye, pretty much rules out any possibility of him reading this.]
But I got my answers to those questions I had so many years ago. No, he never liked me. No, he was trying to keep from leading me on. No, he didn't realize I had schoolgirl crushed on him. No, I didn't intimidate him...maybe.
Amid all the candor, I smiled, realizing that heck, we might actually be friends now.
How ironic is that, eh? Six years ago, I was lamenting that we could have been friends - no, great friends - if only we had more time to get to know each other. If only we had known each other earlier in our undergraduate lives. Turns out I was a little bit right. We needed time, we got it, and look at where we are now.
Yes, it feels surreal.
Surreal, but nice.
3 years ago
