Alan Ilagan

{Note: The Madonna Timeline is an ongoing feature, where I put the iPod on shuffle, and write a little anecdote on whatever was going on in my life when that Madonna song was released and/or came to prominence in my mind.}

Where do we go from here?
This isn’t where we intended to be.
We had it all – you believed in me.
I believed in you.

I don’t remember the first time I saw him. Is that strange? For someone who supposedly meant so much to me, I don’t recall the first time we were in the same room together. It must have been in the Literary Criticism class that we were both taking – my final requirement for an English degree from Brandeis University. I had tumbled off the commuter rail a bit later than anticipated, and had to rush up all the hills and steps before making it to the humanities building. In a sleeveless gray shirt and tattered jeans, I didn’t care how I looked when the weather still clung to August. I was decidedly not dressed to impress, not that first day. (It was a bit of an anomaly, as every day thereafter I would wear a different outfit, as impressive as I could muster, for the remainder of the semester.)

Sitting here racking my brain for our first moment of interaction, I still cannot come up with anything. In a way it makes sense, I never shit where I eat – so when on campus I was never looking for love, or even open to any bit of flirtation. It was probably what got me through college. I saved my obsessions for city folk, for unattainable real estate agents, would-be actor-waiters or gone-in-a-flash T-riders. At school, I was all business, and that Literary Criticism course was the last one I would have to take seriously.

The summer lingered on a bit. I always forgot how hot the start of the Fall semester could be. Above, the sun hovered, slowly traversing the sky over the duration of those September days. There were blue skies then – the gray of November was a distant impossibility.

The first bit of interaction with him that I can recall was a simple exchanging of glances in a second floor hallway. I was sitting on a couch waiting for my next class to begin, and he was headed in the other direction. My eyes followed and caught him turning around as he went down the stairs. From that moment onward I noticed him. He was usually smiling or laughing, entertaining a giggling gaggle of girls, and across the room in our literature class he occasionally smiled at me, raising his eyebrows in question or acknowledgment or invitation.

Certainties disappear,
What do we do for our dream to survive?
How do we keep all our passions alive,
As we used to do?

Dappled sunlight beneath a fiery grove of maple trees. A Nathaniel Hawthorne day in New England. The smell of warm leaves, the whisper of copper-colored pine needles. He sat on a rock, thumbing through a notebook. I stopped and said hello. I mentioned his Structure sweater, explaining that I worked there and could spot them a mile away. He told me he liked them, but all his sweaters ended up unraveling at the end of the sleeve – “something I must be doing with my hand” – and I let the entendre go by without a wink or a saucy word. My nervousness rendered me quiet and submissive around him – an incongruity to what made me fun to be around, and perhaps the fatal flaw in my ultimately winning over those who most impressed me. I left him there, beneath the trees, amused at my own “discombobulation” as Suzie would call it, and wondering at what was going through his head.

A few days later, we got our first set of papers back. After a stern lecture on how this first batch had disappointed him, and how they weren’t at the level we should be at, the professor gave a lovely build-up to what I assumed was a disastrous grade. He went on to say, in one of those dastardly frightening professor moments, that he would leave them on the table and then leave the room, as he didn’t want to see the looks on our faces when we saw the grades. (Still a bit lighter than the sign next to one professor’s office hours that read, “Professional Slaughtering”.)

There was a mad rush for the papers, but I didn’t bother. No sense is hastening the arrival of bad news. I slowly got up and saw my name, but couldn’t quite get to it. He then reached over the other students to grab my paper along with his, and handed it to me. I think I fell in love with him at that moment. That he knew my name, that he struggled against the others to find mine, or that I got a ‘B+’ – I don’t know what made me feel happier. Who can say why we fall when we do?

We continued to see each other around campus – he would always seem to be where and whenever I least expected him, and I was continually caught off guard – the way my whole experience with him threw me off guard. And I couldn’t entirely be fabricating that there was something on his end too, could I? Certainly, I had lived out further-fetched fantasies of love and affection before him (wait until ‘You’ll See’ hits the timeline), was this just another etching solely in my mind?

At work, I confided to my manager who said I should just ask him out. I balked at the idea. I couldn’t, and that would never be my style. Even if I could, what would I say? “Do you want to go out sometime?” I would feel ridiculous. I was too shy for that. I liked to play it off as aloof and nonchalant, but it was simply me being shy, and an acutely killing form of shyness that I was nowhere near ready to combat at that moment.

Deep in my heart I’m concealing
Things that I’m longing to say
Scared to confess what I’m feeling
Frightened you’ll slip away,
You must love me,
You must love me.

A few days later, I thought I might be ready. In the cafeteria of Usdan Center, I saw him arrive at his lunch table. He was alone. My heart was pounding. I picked up the nearby pay phone (yes, there were such things back then) and dialed my store manager and friend John for one last bit of encouragement. He told me to just do it. Thanks, Nike. But it was enough. I marched quickly over to his table, and in what can only be the quickest blurting out of a pathetic pick-up line, said, “I was just wondering if you wanted to hang out sometime.” He smiled and said sure, he’d like to, and he gave me his phone number. It would be one of the only times in my entire life that I asked a guy out.

That was it. I smiled, said hello to the friend who had just joined him, and then said goodbye. If only we could have left it there – when there was nothing but possibility ahead. If only I could have kept it all in my head, living on the remote chance of all the what-ifs my racing brain could giddily conjure. If only… I hadn’t been so lonely. But I couldn’t see that then. All I knew was that he said yes.

I almost danced out of the student center, taking steps two at a time, bouncing off the walls in gleeful celebration. The boy I liked said yes! He said yes! And I was off – literally, figuratively, mentally, you name it – off on a thrilling one-man race that had but one inevitably sad destination. I did not know that yet, and for all the happiness and hope I felt, there was the one nagging worry – what if he didn’t like me the way I liked him? I put my faith in Madonna, and her latest Vanity Fair cover story, where she quoted from The Alchemist:

If you want something bad enough, the whole world conspires to help you get it.

How I wished and prayed that was the case. How my heart yearned for it to be true. There was another quote that haunted me from that Madonna article though, and they were her words directly. It stayed in the back of my mind no matter how hard I tried to dislodge it:

Power is being told you are not loved, and not being destroyed by it.

[To Be Continued…]