See You in Montréal

By Diego Velázquez
Staff Writer

“You know prom’s pretty soon, and I always see you leave things last minute. If you ask somebody to go with you, do it before it’s too late. And make sure you do it, sometimes you think you’re doing things, and I understand why, but you have to be direct: I hope you’ve been”, my mom said. I’d been as direct as I could have brought myself to be—though pulling the plug on the idea before a promposal of sorts could come to be; you are not inspired to kick trash cans in frustration—a vivid memory of a hard school trash can and a confidant comes to mind—about people you don’t care for. It was messy at times, some of it my fault, unquestionably: sometimes people simply do not enjoy the spotlight, even for their triumphs. Love is a rollercoaster, reaching a sublime quality that was followed by the misery of having the person you care the most about wait for everybody to leave before telling you “I’ve heard people have this idea we’re dating, I don’t think that’s accurate, so if you’ve been saying that, drop it”. She was not done with me, though; it was something that took me longer to catch onto than my own desires. Your friend, who later saw herself more as my friend—if you want to be precise—was committed to us. This particularly uncomfortable stage, when it is clear that I still care about you and that you still care about me, but no one dares to express this to one another, lasted many months. In response to this, you started believing I was a whore—who knew I’d be such a good performer of gender—or so I was told. From others’ recollections, the most robotic, in manner, of your friends had eavesdropped on a conversation about you I had with a confidante of mine, convinced I was talking about somebody else; it must’ve not been good news to your idea of me. I followed what your friend—it’d be nice she undid her current “falling off the face of the earth” act—told me to do, and it worked. In certain settings, you were saying you would never go to prom with me, but you took me up on that pending date we had, and that contradiction was not entirely incomprehensible to me. Rosy yearbook messages, on both ends, are my part for which I still stand, and your unique cadence of texting has returned to my life. The issue was the date. I’ve always seen myself as a storyteller, and it had been a facet that had rewarded me while you were gone; unfortunately for me on that occasion, they were not the stories you enjoy. To an admirable seriousness and warranted elitism, I was bringing house parties and some sort of decadence that coexisted with your world, but you hadn’t experienced and therefore couldn’t grasp. It didn’t help to see an unremarkable man tracking me down for the very-not-so-juvenile “senior assassin”, which made your companion at the bagel place where you’re a regular, a bit unseemly. Even the questions about your friends I made were taken wrongly—this image of myself as some Machiavellian figure seems overly pervasive; I understand how people reach this conclusion, but I believe I’m too emotional to truly be one—which I cannot blame you for as I spent a non-insignificant portion of our time inquiring about your thoughts about somebody you thought I’d spent a portion of the year dating: quite my faux pas. You love to walk, and I feel more warmly about the idea than 95% of those around us, making it a natural fit for us. Nevertheless, nothing about me giving you company on the way back to your house felt natural this time. I most vividly remember an argument, walking down the wide sidewalks of Beaconsfield Boulevard, arguing about my friends. The passage of time has made me friendlier to your perspective. Upon your awkward departure, I was confident it was over for us. I sat on the benches of the nearby library and texted a confidant and your friend about how I’d “misread the situation”. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and using a combination of my memory of an encounter between us, I more fondly remember, but also ended with me walking you home, and maps, I set myself on getting flowers delivered for you. It was a bold move, one deliberated with your friend, but it didn’t get the reaction from you that I was hoping for. The closest I got to it was a “thank you” in a seasonally empty school hallway: I’ve never seen you more pained to enunciate a phrase. And to the prom juncture we return. 

I can’t say I always knew you’d be Valedictorian, but I can wholeheartedly affirm I’d hoped it to be the case. I’d known your two other competitors to be notorious cheaters—without a modicum of honesty to them, but nevertheless the profile of a person who succeeds in today’s world—which irked me since it was a repudiation of authenticity, a trait I saw as crucial for the maintenance of decency in the social circles we inhabited. Your Übermensch-like will to succeed beat the soulless tactics of your two competitors. All I had to do was to sit and listen to your victory lap—I don’t recall ever being more focused on a speaker in any setting, a focus that had my usually reliable memory registering you but not the words coming out of your mouth—and so I did. Then, came prom night itself: a moment that comes to mind. Safetyism—does a high school prom really need a security guard to check everything coming in and out of the main hall?—made me resort to alchemy with a 1.5-liter Coca-Cola bottle and a rum bottle in the sterile hotel bathroom, though the communal experience of doing so made the moment anything but sterile. It armed me with courage, and before departing for the sleazy party to come—the type of endeavor you wouldn’t engage in—I raced to the nearly dead dance floor looking for you. There you were with your friends, a fascinating bunch who’d likely never experienced either end of drunken desire. It felt hostile and I thought we were too far apart: the valedictorian and her particularly sheltered friends and the guy who’d fucked up the date, wearing a hoodie by that point of the night, a remarkable visual contrast to the formal prom dresses. Instinctively, I realized my chances seemed grim at that moment, and I remained collected enough to be a rational decisionmaker, backing off. Around that time, I heard I lost your mom’s backing, and I had seen that I didn’t have yours anymore: I thought that was it. 

I was wrong. My family had a Central European blind spot, and I’d maintained my broad powers over family destinations. Anybody can tell you grew up in Prague after two minutes of conversing with you, making my decision intriguing. Yes, I’d gotten heartbroken—not the first summer where you made me feel like that—but I still wanted to understand you, considering my idea of you lacked knowledge of the place where you’d come to be. A bit masochistic on my part, but I figured the only way was through. When I found myself in Vienna, it struck me that you had come back. All it took was you sliding up on my story for us to return to the joyful pastime of making plans together, only to have them derailed due to a lack of availability. The events from early summer and the year prior to it made me realize I had to make it work, for future chances are never guaranteed. And the addendum of seeing you guide me through the place that you so clearly long for, made it a unique opportunity I had ensured would come to happen. Right next to a table of insufferable South American expats in their early thirties—the narcissism of small differences—I found myself in a surreal conversation. I had to sway my parents to let me leave Vienna for Prague a day earlier than planned, explaining that “she” had grown up in the city and it was a unique opportunity. Overruling the objections of my parents, who’d questioned my planning skills—”you’re only telling us this the night before you have to leave?”—and quite possibly my sanity, my dedication to seeing you was enough. Sometimes all you need to do to make the train on no notice is to bargain with the driver: “You get me to the train station fast and I’ll give you a tip [sic]”. With love, and what I like to think of as a modicum of competence, even greater missions could have been possible. Halfway through the train ride, I let you know that, miraculously, I had managed to overcome the obstacles and would be there with you today: you were fully on board with it despite the short notice. The journey was all worth it. I cannot put into words—and if anything, I like to write—what I felt as I saw you at the Central Station and we embraced. It must’ve been the year that preceded it; those hallway talks of “don’t tell anyone we’re a thing because we aren’t”, being worlds apart a couple months prior, the cold “thank you” to my Hail Mary, the terrifying prospect that I wouldn’t see you ever again after prom. That was all gone; for that moment—and the hours following it—all was right with the world. I thought I would never again have the chance to get lost in the majestic blue of your eyes, but I got lost in them at a café. Acknowledging the unflattering ways in which I’d been discussed, I gave up the attempts to craft my image in her eyes, or what was left of them; it was liberating. You didn’t wholly reciprocate with your characteristic oversharing at the margins yet insulated core, but I saw in freedom in you that I hadn’t previously seen. As we walked around the Old Town Square, you sweetly remarked how your dad’s business partners might be roaming the area for us and that we should lay low; yet, a little later, you went, “forget about it; it doesn’t matter what they think”. I got the chance to see you in your element, in your city, taking me to your favorite spots as we caught up in the best moment we’d shared since the beautiful March of the year prior. You’d made time for me on your last day in the city, and you were late for a family dinner; “See you in Montreal” was the last thing I heard you say. I haven’t seen you since.                                               

My mind just kept coming back to you. At a time not too far removed from the present, I had reasons for heartfelt concern—some of them delineated in a previous short story put to print in these pages. In seemingly endless nightly sessions where I’d spend too much time thinking about past mistakes, that picture of us in Prague was the opposite—with it, I had evidence that I was capable of doing things right. I am not a big “picture of self” guy, and neither are you; from what I remember, it was a proof of concept for your mom, yet I am thankful it came to be. I might be holding onto my memories of you for too long, lest I’m aware it is something that will gradually fade away after you, likely, leave town in a few months—though I find it impossible to believe I will ever see you with indifference—; it’s still not a certainty but it seems to be the path that’d most fulfill you. Maybe it’s not entirely on me; your re-entry to my life last summer was sudden and one that vindicated the most hopeful part of me, and your manner towards me didn’t change much from when you had a unilateral crush on me to when you despised me but mostly kept it under wraps to avoid public scrutiny. It bears little explanation as to why one can be heartbroken for longer than when love first struck. In a world where we’re bound by unglamorous, straightforward phenomena, love merely is as it exists in a higher paradigm we don’t fully understand, and I believe that explains our atemporal chase for it.