#22

(Havia um texto aqui, que será reescrito. Infelizmente, ele foi perdido devido à minha falta de cuidado. Agora, neste momento de frustração, a raiva prevalece e ele permanecerá perdido. Mas em breve, estará aqui. Aguarde!)

(O texto original, que tinha muito mais intensidade e insight, infelizmente foi apagado por um erro de atenção meu. Ninguém chegou a lê-lo, nem mesmo eu o reli. Tentei aqui recria-lo, mas alerto que não tem a mesma emoção, o mesmo sentimento de antes.)

Nicole Mead. On moving day my junior year of college I was a volunteer to help the freshmen move in. One of the first vans to pull up to the parking lot contained a long-legged blonde with a radiant smile. That wasn't Nicole. Her name was Katie, and I promptly volunteered to carry the mini-fridge up to her room. The elevator on that dorm building was broken (as usual, on moving day), so I carried the not-so-light fridge up three flights of stairs while Katie opened doors for me. You see, in a dorm building there are many locked security doors for... Well, security reasons, so moving in required some planning to quickly get those doors open or risk dropping a big screen television set down the stairs. In this case, it was a fridge, but it was equally risky to carry it, as I tried to smile and not break a sweat. Katie opened all the doors along the way except for the last one. That would be her room door, because her roommate had already arrived and was in there, a non blonde without long legs or a smile. Just a regular girl. That was Nicole.

On the first day of classes, I went up to their room to see if they wanted to check out the poster sale in the quad. Katie couldn't, because of class or some equally unconvincing excuse. But Nicole promptly offered to come along, and so she did. On the way, I noticed how nice it was to have this girl's undivided attention. It was something incredibly powerful to feel like you were at the center of everything, and nothing I'd ever felt before. At the poster sale we talked more about ourselves, and about music, movies (easy subjects to talk about when there are posters involved), and she made me smile and I made her laugh. A few hours later, it felt like we had instantly become great friends. Yes, friends, because... Well, I forgot ot mention she had a boyfriend back home, about an hour away from college, and I had a girlfriend much farther away -- she was studying abroad doing a bus tour in Europe. I guess because of that, it was rather easy for us to open up to each to each other and enjoy the closeness of our sudden friendship.

Along with the friendship came the usual clichés -- her boyfriend started getting jealous of me, rumours around campus said that we were together, and since it was known we both had significant others that reflected poorly on our image. Neither of us cared. Our closer friends knew we were just friends, and we enjoyed hanging out with each other too much. So much that almost every day of the week she'd hang out in my room until 4 a.m., when the R.A. would come and tell her it was past visiting hours and she had to go to her own room. We simply laughed at the whole thing, and meanwhile we'd spent hours and hours just watching TV, listening to music and talking about nothing and everything at the same time. We stuck together because we could, and we felt good and guilt-free about it. She'd help with my photography assignment and I'd help her with her presentation for Dialogues class. She'd proof-read my poems and I would test her with her flash cards for the anatomy mid-term. And nothing ever felt wrong about it.

And then it was time for THE dance. Well, maybe not THE dance, because it wasn't a big deal at my school, but the homecoming dance. I didn't worry about it because my girlfriend wasn't there, and I imagined Nicole would go with her boyfriend, but it turned out the guy had a dance to attend in his school on the same exact date, and they decided they'd each attend their own dance. So I told her we should go as friends, along with a group of course, and so we went. I did my best not to give her all my attention during the dance and let her have her own time there, after all it was a group thing.

When we got back from the dance though, we were talking in my room and she said she felt I should've given her more attention, since I was her date and all. I smoothly made up for it by inviting her to one more slow dance, right there. So we danced to the slow dance and avoided looking at each other, just listening to the music quietly. But then one of us went to say something, we looked in each other's eyes, and I knew it. I could feel it in her eyes, in her lips, in the way her arms were around my neck. I knew I could kiss her at that moment, I knew that I wanted it and she wanted it too. But then I thought about my girlfriend, about her boyfriend, and about everything else that was there. I chickened out. I didn't do it, I didn't follow the moment.

Of all the things that happened in my life, I feel that this one is perhaps the most defining moment. Not sailing around the world. Not deciding to spend 6 years studying abroad. Not deciding to come back after those 6 years. This one moment, this one kiss I didn't take, is the fork on the road for me. I often look back at that day with mixed feelings, wanting to know what would've happened if I had done things differently. Nicole and I remained friends after that day, and we even shared a similar moment or two after this, but nothing with such intensity. A few months later her boyfriend broke up with her and she seeked solace in the shoulders of her female friends, and not mine. Shortly thereafter I went to study abroad for a semester, and when I came back I just wasn't her friend anymore. If we exchanged 5 sentences after my return, it was too much. That closeness, that magic between us, it was all gone. I was no longer the center of her world. Looking at all the "what-ifs" in my life, this is the one I wish I could go back to and try the other path. I know in my mind that I did the right thing then, but the aftermath felt so wrong... I wonder if doing the wrong thing would've made things feel right. At the very least, it would've felt good knowing that I kissed her.