Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,24

to join the group and get on the bus to the airport, she poked her head into the library, where I was working. I stepped outside to chat. Was I on a break? Unclear. I was under the impression that talking to Electra was part of my job description.

“Are you excited?” I asked.

She looked away glumly. “I guess,” she said.

“Are you nervous?”

“I’ve been thinking about my mom. I’ve been thinking about how happy she would be for me. I’ve been thinking about how I don’t want to do this great thing without her being able to see it.”

She started to cry. I embraced her. We stayed like that for a while, in the hall outside the library, while a bus idled somewhere nearby, waiting to take her away.

Finally, we separated. We agreed that she should probably get going. We hugged again and I squeezed her and whispered in her ear, “Please have the best time.” And then she walked off down the hall to something new and unknown.

* * *

—

I really loved her. Isn’t that something? Before I knew myself, before I knew that sexuality was a spectrum, before the difficulties of college and becoming and stepping out into the world, I fell in love with a young woman in high school. We had a friendship that bloomed into a prom date like the culmination of a teen romcom. It’s a simple story. And one that could end right there. Except it doesn’t. Or rather it won’t.

Whenever I talk about Electra, the ending of the story rises up almost of its own volition and then dissolves into questions. And when faced with the end, I can’t help but rethink everything we shared before it. Had I really felt what I remember feeling? Or was it just a crush? Did it matter to her like it mattered to me? What was it about that summer in the dusty stacks that changed me so? What was her experience of this period? Who had she been before we met? And what happened after she went away, going to college in Pennsylvania, responding to all of our friends less and less often on Instant Messenger, until she became a question that we asked each other from our far-flung destinations: Have you heard from Electra? Do you know if she’s having a good time? Is she doing okay?

And then, the end. The question that lingers to this moment, unanswerable: In April of 2002, I got a call at my parents’ house from a high school friend. She wanted to know if I’d heard the terrible news. Earlier that month, the world had lost Electra. My friend on the phone didn’t know why, only that Electra had taken her life. No one knew why. And I sank to the floor of my parents’ laundry room and stared into the darkness, trying to picture her face, her huge smile, the way she bounced when she walked, even when she was experiencing a mixed emotion, even as she composed herself while leaving the library that afternoon three Aprils prior.

When I was a strange, uncomfortable boy, I met a melancholy, cerebral girl. And none of that exists anymore. But for me it’s not locked away in the past. It’s unresolved, as if there is still a glimmer of possibility somehow. It’s Christmas lights strung across a barn ceiling in anticipation of a magical night, or the release of an album that will change Madonna’s life and ours; it’s dusty books waiting to be put back in order.

I tell this story to get back there, to unwind the ending, despite the realities of life. And of death. When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.

And so one time our story ends in the car racing toward the mall with Madonna blasting from the stereo, and another under the night sky in the barn’s courtyard, and another while she and three others sing “This Used to Be My Playground” at graduation, just like she said she would. And yet another ends the first time she told me her name and I felt bright lights sizzle to life inside