One of my customers looks like the heartthrob from sweet sixteen. Jake, right? Jake drives the red sports car and has the most unlikely crush on Molly Ringwald's character. And my customer looks like Jake would look if he aged in the most wonderful way. Olive skin, sheepish grin, dark hair and eyes, and slightly unaware of just quite how attractive he is. He's a little shy, but seems to enjoy my conversation. We've had a few, the last about marathon training. He was tapering down, and about to run his first. He's also married. He's got the ring, and he's slipped "my wife" into one of our coffee talks. He'll never know these things I think.
I had this friend once. I was scared of him at first. I could tell his was dangerous territory, so I kept the conversation as surface as I am capable, and would flee his company as quickly as it would come. He persisted though...luring me in with games - literally. There were all kinds of movie like moments that happened during the time we spent together. Dancing in the grass in the early morning hours. Two step lessons. Sledding in the snow. Spinning cars in icy parking lots. Spring time car rides. The friendship has been over for quite some time now. The end was pretty awful. I never told him.
I had this conversation with a friend Sunday evening over wine and gin & ginger. The gin and ginger was a mistake. While sipping her mistake, she asked, "why is it that we've all had these feelings or thoughts about people. Friends we've felt more for, or friends we've been hurt by, and for some reason, we never let them know. Why don't we ever let them know? What are we afraid of?"
I obviously don't let the Jake look-alike know because he's married. And obviously we're all afraid of rejection, and it's not my style to let people know they've affected me. Better for them to think I'm immune to all of that feeling stuff. And sometimes there are things people should know that they're never told, like how nice they look in red, or how much the room brightens with their smile. But the more I thought about her inquiry, the more I wonder about the unspoken, the secret, and the idea that this tension of secret truths is so much of what makes everything, well, everything.
As I sit here and type this, I'm looking around at a shop full of people, couples, business acquaintances, friends, and they're all in conversation with someone else. And in the in between, in the spaces we cannot see with our eyes, are all of these hidden words, thoughts that have been thought, feelings felt, likely many times, that will never be spoken. They're in the space between, like the silent breaths we take that keep our lungs full of air.
