Yesterday
“Is Pat still with his girlfriend?” I asked in the most neutral way possible with my face forward, hands clasped in my lap.
“Oh yeah,” Kav answered.
“Wow, that’s impressive,” I said. My head tilted to the side and I scanned the section, making sure to focus on the swimmers in the fading sunlight.
“They’ve been together over two years now.” Kav kept going as I wished him to stop talking. “I can’t believe Pat would find a girl he could like that much to stay with for that long, ya know?”
“Yeah, that’s impressive,” I repeated. I had nothing else to say.
A little something inside me died. For one, I had resorted to asking a 19-year-old about a 22-year-old boy I was madly in love with, and two, it was now clear I would never have said boy no matter how much I wanted him.
“I was just thinking…about what…” Kav looked at me questioningly. “…About what he said when you asked him if he was trying to hang out with his girl. Hewaslikenonotreally.” I rushed the last part and hoped my face wasn’t blushing.
“I think he meant for other reasons,” Kav answered.
My chest heaved a quiet sigh and I went back to focusing, almost too, intently on a group of swimmers at the back of the section.
I’m too old for this, I thought to myself. I should be in stable adult relationship, not pining after some freshly-graduated-college kid. Nothing I had done in the last three years had been able to rectify my feelings for Pat. Even spending a year apart and talking only every once and a while hadn’t shaken him from my mind. Now it seemed nothing ever would. I would have to just accept it; the being-in-love-with-Pat thing.
That’s interesting, how would that work exactly?
But, it was too late on what had been a busy, sunny, madhouse kind of day for me to begin to think about it.
“Let’s close the section.” I elbowed Kav and he handed me the megaphone.