Harrison

When I was working at my first job, as a lifeguard at a health and fitness club’s pool, I met a boy named Harrison something. He had red hair that technically made him a ginger, but he usually wore it long enough that it seemed almost brown and he had the type of preppy boy street credibility that allowed us all to forgive him and remember his attractiveness, if in the most self-centered, approval-seeking way. He was only a few years older than me, but might as well have been light years. I was in high school. He attended my future college, although neither of us knew that right away.

Who’s to say what enlightened me to the fact that in some part of him he found me to be physically attractive, all I remember is becoming quickly aware of it and falling pathetically fast into another emotional endeavor—one I was entirely ill-equipped to address. I remember seeing his name next to mine on the work schedule and unsuccessfully pushing down the leaps of my stomach to my throat. I unknowingly seeked attention, he was someone to give it.

Of course nothing happened between he and I outside of my imagination. my mind was young and wild enough then to tell elaborate stories over and over again and produce the same perky thrill each time; the only nag at the back of my mind pushing me to feel unsatisfied with these thrills was my desire for what I had never had. And that desire, unfortunately, only grew as time wore on.

But the summer before I entered my senior year of high school, I took a two week-long trip with my dad to Germany to visit relatives. Most of them spoke only German, and none of them were even close to me in age. I spent two weeks in a blur of food I loved and food I politely hated, becoming well-accustomed to the fact that in other countries there is such a thing as “sparkling” water, and that often to cool them on a hot day Germans desire to crack open water that is somehow unnecessarily (in my opinion then) carbonated.

There are two instances in which I remember perceiving a powerful connection between myself and someone I presumed was my own age (or close to it). One happened when my dad and I went to a park in Munich and observed a few teenaged/twenty-something boys (and a few girls I was unabashedly jealous of) surfing a wave as it emerged ad infinitum from underneath a stone bridge. I wrote a piece about it then, about the disgustingly addictive glance I shared with one of these said surfers. And the other important moment from that trip I recall as the reflective moments I spent thinking about Harrison while walking along a vineyard.

It being decades ago in the sped-up timing of adolescent growing, I can’t recall exactly the fantasy I allowed myself with Harrison. Surely it was innocent enough; probably had something to do with a picnic or a shared shift where he did something romantic like ask me out. But regardless, I remember feeling such a positive connection as I walked in the worn-in path of the vineyard’s dirt road. I didn’t pay attention to the grapes or the trees as they were so much as I paid attention to the way Harrison might visualize me walking among them. I couldn’t seem to separate myself from the thought of the two of us together, and in my mind’s eye I only saw what desire pushed forth for me. My dad, who never has been good at understanding moments of reflection as they occur to other people, only walked forward without me, speaking quick and light German to my grandmother’s youngest brother, Clemens. They faced forward with almost no knowledge of me as I struggled to pull myself back to Earth at the clear expense of my own wishes.

I’ve no idea what has happened to Harrison now; he’s since graduated and our time at Loyola had always been a sort of pseudo-friendly demon anyway. I think I bought a boxed cake with the intention of baking it for his birthday once, but realized quickly what an impulse buy it had been.

I do have to think though, that if we were to see each other now we wouldn’t entirely be strangers. We never shared anything between the two of us, not really, but he did know and have valuably new faith in me at a time in my life during which I hadn’t yet realized how to measure my own worth.