On the last podcast, we talked about unraveling the habits of ego, so you can feel attraction as it naturally arises between you and a her (and trust your perception on the matter), rather than get stuck in figure-it-out-land and miss your window of invitation.
I’ll share more on the topic here, in hope that it clarifies the mechanism. And the stakes.
So…
I have a photograph of this girl.
In December 2002, it became my most treasured possession.
It was taken at a Christmas party. In it, I’m wearing a Santa’s hat, my lips are red from snakebite black, and kissing me on the cheek is a girl, tall, tanned and brunette, who wears a sleeveless purple dress that reaches up to her neck like a cheongsam. Now this is a real kiss on the cheek. You see a little tension in her shoulders, as if she’s snuggling in, but the rest of her is relaxed; she gives me everything. Her countenance is soft and my own eyes pop open, as if shocked to bathe in this energy. She’s entered me. And at the bottom of the frame, though her lower arm is cut from the photo, it seems her hand lurches down to my crotch. That’s the great ambiguity of the shot. I can’t remember if she had me by the balls that night, or whether that was later conjecture.
When I went home that Christmas, I told all my friends I was on the cusp of a new relationship. With a Mexican. I flew in the stratosphere, for weeks. The void of my teenage love-life, filled.
But the night of the photograph was the last time I saw her.
Each time I visited her apartment, she was out.
When I spoke with her housemates, they responded through those eyes of kind regret.
And when I burned her a mix-CD and got no response, I knew the game was gone.
The aftermath came with a winter.
But this story doesn’t have a beginning—let’s rewind. Every near miss is shaped by its initial conditions:
* * *
The night of that photo was three months too late. The Mexican and I were Christmas-drunk; she dished out the gifts of her love for nothing more than old times’ sake.
We’d met each other in September, during the first week of college.
I was placed in lodgings a mile away from the vibrant student dorms. My housemates were nice, but I needed people who got me. This meant finding friends in the music scene, with whom I could party my way.
To find my tribe in those first university weeks, I had to practice approaching.
So I went alone to an underground music night. Early in the evening, close to the bar, two guys stood with a girl, and their group had an open posture. I went in and we got talking.
First impression: I pulled the trigger, and these people were cool. We swapped numbers and became a gang of four. We’d party together on Saturday night. I guess I was too ecstatic about the friendship, not wanting to fuck the encounter up or embarrass myself, that I lingered little on the model looks of the girl.
Anyway, in those days hot girls were blonde. In my 19-year-old erotic imagination, latinas did not have a place.
Saturday was awesome. A night in the club as a newborn group. We ended, around 5am, back at mine. I got fragments, a sort of vibe, that the Mexican had been intimate with one of the guys. But I wouldn’t know that until later. She was sort of leaning away. Anyway, I slept with deep relief that I had found the start of a tribe.
Monday night, I was invited for drinks. Somehow, the guys didn’t come. Just the Mexican, her five female housemates, and me. There was chaos in the student bar, of course, but through much of the night she had her hand on my hand, or on my lower arm, or on my upper arm. At times she had both her hands on different parts of my arm. When I turned to look her in the face, the blacks of her dark brown eyes would dilate and laugh, and she beamed. I felt her accent linger inside me. She said my shortened name, as if she’d called it for years.
Later that week, more drinks. Me and the girls. Pints were downed, vodka, cocktails. Lengthy moments in the autumn air, singing and waltzing home; her eyes, both of them stars, in an infinite night sky. A couple of times she found me in a lecture we happened to share, and she cuddled in beside me. Just the two of us, communication, philosophy, for a whole hour. We all hugged each other freely in those days. I guessed this—tribe, belonging—awaited all of us on leaving home.
There’s a lot to figure out, finding your way at a new university. The rhythm of classes, what your professors are like, where to find room B6. The morning I realised I was in love with the Mexican, the invites on my phone had changed. Our tribe for club-nights reduced to three, and whenever I asked about our fourth member, there was a grimace on my taller buddy’s face. He’d spent a night with her, I knew it. She now avoided his limp longing, and quietly wandered away.
The Mexican and her flatmates merged with a different group of boys. To protect my new buddy’s feelings (and, I guess, my own), I didn’t tell anyone what I felt about her. I’d missed out on women before—though recognising I’d had a shot and blown it with her hurt. But what hurt more was how this desire for her lived squashed in my belly for years, unable to be spoken or rinsed through. How at every future party there was a missing piece, how I’d look out of every window, every door, in hope she’d soon arrive. Her two arms around my arm, her deep and natural laughter, her being there affirming to the whole world who I was. But nothing. There’s a lot of longing locked up in great desire.
By that point, of course, every other woman was a wet imposter compared to the Mexican. If I received any signals from other interested women I missed them through missing the Mexican, and all the could-have-beens I invented in my mind. Anyway, I didn’t look at blondes or Englishgirls after that. I’d started my decade of latinas.
When I ran into the Mexican at the Christmas party, it came as a surprise. She’d given up the music scene, she said. Turns out, it just wasn’t her.
* * *
They talked about the ego in psychology class, but it took years to figure out what ego meant for me. Truth is, I chose psychology at uni to figure out women. But all the professors seemed to show us were rats lost in mazes, and the impairment of cognitive function under the surprise of flashing lights.
My ego, it seemed, did not grant me vision to recognise the beauty of the Mexican, or how she might have liked me, out of the gate.
My ego, out of assumed loyalty to a friend and its terror of never-belonging, minimised every signal she gave me, and filed all her touches under ‘normal’.
My ego, overwhelmed, froze the moment under the moonlight when I might have kissed her. It clenched up my desire and hid it, unsure about her desire or her permission.
My ego, it seemed, became safe to feel the attraction only after she left.
My ego, in a strange sort of coping, looked out at the Cardiff rain, and lived versions of our unlived story for almost two years after we’d met.
—
I found that photograph the other day, the one of the Mexican dressed in purple, and her lurching, ambiguous hand. I found it in a shoebox while helping family pack up our old house. Next to the photo, my old student IDs, and other early shots of those days of festivals and travel.
When I look back at images of me at nineteen, something astounds me:
I looked good. Never again in my life would I be that fresh and that handsome. If only I’d seen myself in the mirror and known it, I could have had any of the women I met.
You know what haunts me more than anything?
I was alone with the Mexican in her bedroom, at least a handful of times. One afternoon, as she was changing, I looked at all the photos she’d stuck to her wall. Who’s that? I asked, of a cheerful-looking guy, somewhere in the middle.
She looked at me open-eyed, made that throaty giggle, and no doubt touched my arm.
Oh, that’s my ex. She said. I so loved him.
He also had ginger hair!
