The SoCal Years 3: About a Him

The Riveting Adventures of A Filipina-American Actor-Girl in the Southern California Jungle

The SoCal Years hubs comprise a series of narrative essays from the late 1990s, pre-9/11, immediately after grad school when, knowing she would run screaming back to the East Coast in the end, a young-ish Pinay New Yorker, armed with her new Drama MFA, decided nonetheless to dip her toes into the Hollywood swamp.

We'll call him J. I figured it was time to say a word or three about him. Oddly enough, there's only been one song—but about a dozen unsent letters.

They say you only meet the "right" person 4-6 times in your life. I fear I've almost used up my quota. Every one of the men I've had a long-term involvement with, with an eye toward the future, has been the right man. Except, of course, for the one or two irreconcileable differences that ultimately drove us apart in each case.

Have you ever met someone who completes you utterly? This one does me. Aside from the incidentals—that he's articulate, gentle, athletic, funny, sexy beyond belief—we click on so many levels, almost too many to mention. You wouldn't be interested in hearing too much about it. At any rate, I wouldn't be able to get past the golf ball in my throat.

Rarely do I obsess over feelings unrequited. Well, I suppose it's not the feelings I obsess over, but the man. No, that's not true either. Many's a night I've railed at myself just to get over it. Get over him. Get over him already! Pain is so uncool—and whereas my threshhold for physical pain is high by most standards, not so the one for emotional pain. Well, maybe that's not true either. There's a good old oldie sung by the late Karen Carpenter that goes, "It's a dirty old shame that all you get from love is a love song—because the best love songs are written with a broken heart..." Well. Some of my best work...

He is (was?) my best friend. Ever fall in unrequited love with your best friend? Don't. For one thing, it changes every damn thing about your day-to-day together. For another, the pain magnifies, knowing that, as your best friend, he completes you utterly.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

...it's just that I'm always surprised again that I still think of him. In the small, quiet spaces after I've finally turned off my Mac. When I'm not focusing on audition preparation. When there's reading to do and thesis notes to take, that I can't bring myself to do just then. When there's only the white-noise purr of the crickets outside my window.

It's worst at night when it's hot out and I can't sleep, in spite of exhaustion and a full belly, and two Valerian root capsules to induce drowsiness. I'm still caught unawares by that golf ball blocking my esophagus, the unwelcome watering of my eyes when I stop to consider all the if-only's. If only I didn't love him. If only I could still be in his presence without difficulty, in spite of loving him. If only I knew for sure that separating myself from him was ultimately less pain-producing than being around him, filled to the brim with something there are no words to do justice to, and which I can hardly even comprehend and certainly can't always write clearly about. Like now.

Are you waiting for me to say if only he loved me too? I fear he might and just can't say so. I fear I've missed a signal. I fear I wouldn't know what in the world to do if he ever did. Mostly I fear what is probably reality—that beyond affection for a friend and a powerful physical attraction exists a void. Giving in would be death. It would. I know because this isn't the first time I've felt a compelling love for a friend who had nothing to give (take?) in return, but the physical. In that instance, I gave in to animal passion—and lost a year getting over him.

Oh what's the difference. It's been a year this time as well, and counting. I did get the start of a song out of it, during this less musically-prolific period in my life—a little keepsake to count for all this angst over a man far too young for me, and who I'd go nuts trying to hang onto at any rate, if he ever were to look at me differently.

Sappy and indulgent. I'll try to do less of this in the future.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

I wonder if he really misses me, or whether—as in the sumptuous, poetic letters he writes by hand—in that maddening, disingenuous way he has of humoring his insanely long list of admiring women friends—he just says he does. ◊

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