I hope you Dance

I have written this entry in my head a few times over the years. Every so often I hear a song on the radio, and I go back to college in my mind to an unlikely friendship that I had for a short time.

One day the “most popular guy in the dorm” showed up at my door. Now I feel this needs to be explained; this young man was a year younger than me, possibly almost a foot shorter than me, and every girl in the dorm seemed to be absolutely stupid over him. I didn’t get it at all, but then of course I was surrounded by former high school cheerleaders, and apparently he had been a football player. – Yay for some people latching on to stereotypes.

So, he showed up at my door one afternoon when I had the door and window open listening to country music. Normally this kept people far away from me and I could work in peace. He knocked politely on my door and said “hi” and said he liked my music. I said thanks, and then he almost sheepishly asked if I had been the one also listening to Phantom of the Opera – needless to say I was surprised that he knew it, so we started talking. His room was right below mine and I started to apologize for my music being too loud, and he said he enjoyed my music and was hoping to borrow and copy some CDs. I got out my CDs for him to look through, and we started talking music and movies, and talked for almost an hour I think.

It really was an unlikely friendship. He’d come to talk about music or movies, and then we ended up playing pool quite a bit – there were tables in the basement of our dorm in a lounge across from his room. The one evening he said he wanted to show me something, and invited me into his room – he shut the door and opened the window and sort of whistled, and this beautiful little tabby cat immediately came to his window and came in to hang out. He had been buying food for the cat and bringing it in every night to stay with him. He had the biggest smile on his face holding that little cat. That moment set our friendship. – Too bad I am allergic to cats

I think my favorite part was that this guy was most proud of making it into the university’s chamber choir. He was good at sports, but loved music – yet he never bragged about his music at all. Sometimes he would ask if I would just listen to him practice and give him feedback; he had what I thought was an amazing voice, but in all reality how would I know what is good, but what he really wanted to do was talk about the meanings of songs, the emotions.

– End result, every girl in the dorm HATED me because he spent a lot of time with me. Guess who didn’t care. I enjoyed this friendship.

I often think about him and remember the opinions of a lot of the other people in the dorm. Most of the girls were stupid over him, and the ones he rejected were down right bitchy. A lot of the guys hated him because he was “a dick.” – One time they (the guys on his floor) even tried to superglue his door shut, and then they felt like total shits because I had been in there too. I was like the “sister” of almost every guy on that floor. When they asked what I was doing in there all I said was “talking” – we had been talking about Phantom of the Opera, the play and the book, and he was singing Eric’s parts as we listened to the soundtrack.

Then one evening he was tore up – he was so drunk he could barely stand, and he came and asked if we could talk. I sat there and he held the little cat and cried. He was in love with his best friend, a girl had had known “all his life,” who had followed “the love of her life” off to college in Arizona. He had just got off the phone with her, and this “love of her life” had sent her to the hospital… He was heartbroken because he loved her so much and he was in Oregon and could not BE there for her, and heartbroken because she had been so hurt in so many ways by someone she loved. He was more hurt that someone had hurt her then by the fact that he was not with her…In my mind that is real love. I listened as he said he loved her so much that he just wanted her to be happy, but he didn’t know what to do.

He sat and cried and I tried to do what I could to comfort him. I had never seen someone with their heart so hurt as him.

Almost every day for the rest of that term we would talk about everything and anything. At the end of the term he left; he lasted a semester and then transferred to Arizona to be with her. I think I was the only person he said good-bye to.

This was my second year of college when most of my friends were gone for one reason or another. I never really talked about him or the friendship we had. I, for the life of me, cannot really think of why. I look back and I wonder if it is because I thought people wouldn’t understand because on the surface we were so different…I sometimes wonder if it was because he shared a part of himself that he did not seem to share with anyone else, not that it was meant to be a secret, but it was a matter of trust. He trusted me for one reason or another, and he felt safe being himself…I suppose writing this has felt like a violation of that trust in some ways, but it was the fall of 2000 and it has been 12 years now. These are my memories of that time and something that I don’t want to lose…

There is one song that always makes me think of him, “I hope you Dance.” It was the first song he actually sang for me when we were hanging out, and we spent a lot of time talking about the meaning of the song and what we wished for people in our lives…

Every time I hear the song I think of him, and I miss our brief friendship, and I truly hope he found some happiness.