2002-11-23 - 2:58 p.m.

How’s your writing going?”

I don’t think I could have asked for a better cue than yesterday, as Ariel and I stood outside at the Boston University West subway stop, waiting for an inbound Green Line train. I’d just met up with her about twenty minutes earlier, and most of that time was spent with her on her cell phone, apologizing to her friend Heather for leaving something Heather needed locked in her dorm room. So already it appeared that Ariel’s mid-week trip to the city was going to be cut even shorter than originally planned, as she now had to try her best to catch the 9:35 bus back to her school to let Heather back into her room. If she missed that, there wouldn’t be another until 11:30. As much as I knew she had to get back if she could, I really, deep down, was kind of hoping she wouldn’t catch the 9:35, selfish as it was of me to think that way.

Instead of trying to do something to slow her down and keep her in the city longer, I decided my original plan, to finally tell her how I felt before going to the Pain (our group’s nickname for the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square where we spend most of our nights), would simply have to be amended. I had to find a way to tell her in the next half hour, before she had to catch a bus back to school. This, I knew, was going to be difficult unless I happened to see just the right moment. And then she asked me, “How’s your writing going?”

We’d just missed a train, so some quick mental math after she asked me the question told me I would probably have enough time to tell her, let it sink in, and maybe even get a reaction before the next one came, so I just started in, telling her, as best I could, what I’d told my diary a week earlier.

“It’s going quite well,” I told her. “I finally figured out why I wasn’t writing before. See...” and as I started to confess my feelings, I could already feel my stomach shivering and my hands shaking as I desperately tried to hold myself together long enough to make her understand. “...sometimes, when I sit down to write something, I just can’t do it, and the reason is nothing to do with the writing itself, but rather with what’s going on in my life. Sometimes, I have something more important on my mind. And like any fictional character I might have in my head, trying to get me to write about it, if I don’t recognize this something more as something I need to write about, I’ll never get to the things I’m trying to just work on. But once I figure it out and sit down and write out what’s on my mind, then everything else just flows out like water. In this case, the something that was on my mind... just happened to be...” I breathed in slowly, then a jittery breath out, and at the end of it said, “you.”

Her eyebrows raised a little and her mouth started to curl up at the ends despite her attempts to feign disinterest, the way a person would pretend not to care if someone told them, “Someone in this room just won a thousand dollars,” until they knew for sure that the “someone” the person was talking about was them. “Oh?” she asked.

“Yeah...” I slowly continued, trying to explain myself carefully, without my voice shaking too much. “For the past few weeks, every time I’ve sat down to write something, the only thing I could concentrate on is you, and the way I feel about you, which is... well... I...” I paused, trying to gather my thoughts. My mouth opened and closed again and again, hoping that maybe words would find their own way out despite the fact that I found myself totally unable to come up with what to say. Finally, I just said, “well, the simple fact that I can’t seem to actually *say* how I feel should make it rather obvious what I’m trying to say.”

She smiled, finally willing to let it go now that she knew, and said, “Yes, it does,” smiling widely and looking to the side. The anticipation was killing me, so I had to ask her how she felt about that. She started by saying she was flattered, then pausing, which scared the hell out of me. The last time I asked someone else and she said she was flattered, it was followed by a “...but I’m already dating someone.” I knew it wouldn’t be followed by *that,* exactly, but the various other things that could follow that started running through my head and sending my stomach twisting around, until she finally said, “And I’ve definitely thought about you that way, too. The problem is, in three weeks, I’m going home, then to Italy. And I don’t want anything to happen that will make me lose you as a friend.”

I looked her straight in the eyes and told her that her friendship is too important for me to risk it, and that I knew, whatever happens between us, she doesn’t have to worry about hurting that friendship. I also told her, and knew it was true as soon as I said it, that I was more than willing to wait the four or so months while she’s gone, becausee it’s been far longer than that since I found someone with whom I felt so comfortable, happy, and just plain right with as I do with her. After thinking for a bit, taking it in, adjusting, he told me she definitely wanted to see more of me, and with that, the train came, and our discussion of the state of our relationship was put on hold, and instead replaced by discussion of how we had gotten to that point, things we’d been thinking about and talked to other people about, even though we haven’t been able to talk to each other about them. Like the day when we were at a party at my friends Simon and Heather’s, and I had to occasionally steer a very inebriated Simon away from her so he wouldn’t blurt something out to me without noticing she was standing a foot away. Then she told me that I’d been in a dream of hers, which she found odd because she doesn’t have dreams with people she knows in them very often. I told her I have dreams with people I know in them, but I usually forget them until they come true.

We made it to the Kendall T stop, where she needed to catch the 9:35 bus when both of our watches said she still had time to catch it. Apparently the bus driver disagreed, because he wasn’t there when we arrived. I felt bad that she’d missed her bus, but selfishly, I was happy that I got to spend two more hours with her. She called Heather (ast least, I think that’s who she called) to tell her she’d missed the bus and now wouldn’t be back until after midnight. As I stood there, my phone started vibrating with a message from a different Heather, who knew I’d been planning to tell Ariel how I was feeling, which simply asked, “So?” Meanwhile, I heard Ariel on her phone saying, “You’re going to laugh when I get back and tell you what happened today. *pause* Well, I’m here with Dave... Dave? *pause to let it sink in* Yeah, that’s right.” And with that, I knew the news had made it to her school, and that, somehow, just made it feel more real. When she got off the phone, we headed back down to the subway and to Harvard Square to meet up with people at the Pain.

When we stepped out of the Harvard T stop, I had to stop her, because I knew that whoever was going to be there waiting for us was going to want to know how (and if) things went, so before we went, we had to figure out what to tell them. Which was difficult because, at the time, I wasn’t totally sure myself. I just knew that, in general, it was good. So we stood there, talking a bit longer, me leaning against a Boston Metro newspaper dispenser thing, her standing in front of me. She told me she didn’t want me to have to wait for her while she was in Italy, and I told her it wouldn’t be waiting in the sense that I would have to hold up a righteous hand and send back the teeming hordes of women trying to be with me. Rather, it would be an easy wait, knowing that a few months of simply not looking for anyone else, knowing that I wouldn’t find anyone better even if I did look, wouldn’t be difficult at all if I knew that at the end of it I could be with her again. She smiled widely and told me that it was very nice to have someone think of her like that. She stepped to the side and leaned against the Metro dispenser with me, her face very close to mine, looking directly into my eyes. After a few moments of that, I said, “so, the question that still hangs here is, what do we tell people?” She thought for a second, looked me in the eyes, and simply took my hand into hers. I looked down, smiled, and said, “You know, I think that’s an excellent suggestion.” And with that, hand in hand, we headed off to tell the others the news.