Love
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I don't count the unrequiteds
I'd have to say it's The Genius. I started dating him at the end of my college sophomore year - just before he graduated with his dual degrees in music and English. He'd been as close to majoring in mathematics and German. All four were kinds of language. If love is a language, he spoke that, too. I fell for him while designing and hanging lights for his senior composition recital. He played piano quite well, but he had huge hands and felt clumsy playing anything fast. His instrument was the euphonium, little brother of the tuba. His compositions had amazing range - a Bach-like lullaby, followed by an avant-garde vocal piece in German, followed by an atonal Schoenberg-style sonata for two pianos. It's funny: The night I hung lights was the night I met the theatre ghost. Every stage has one, born either of tradition or necessity. I was alone on the catwalks around 2 a.m. and felt a huge push that knocked me onto my knees and scared me half to death. When The Genius, also finishing up the night before the performance, returned to the stage, I almost jumped the 40 feet to say I was glad to see him. Our actual relationship that summer was a flurry of weekends where one of us would drive two hours up or down Maryland's Eastern Shore to spend it sneaking sex - either hiding mischievously from the married couple I roomed with or hiding desperately from his church-and-casserole parents. I once aborted a visit because a hurricane hit halfway there. When a tree blew across my path, I called him from an 1880s-style phone with the mouthpiece mounted on the wall of a strange farmhouse in the middle of El Dorado, Maryland. As with a well-planned crime, most of the available details are circumstantial. He wrote poems about chickens. He collected baseball cards and pieces of weed-whacker wire that he found on the ground. He had asthma, which amused me to no end the first time we slept together. We dated for two months in college, for three months that summer, and for another three months long-distance after he went to grad school in Florida. Long-distance relationships seem like good ideas. In reality we were both depressed. My horrible solution was to sleep with an old crush and then call The Genius on his birthday and not be able to delay telling him. We kept up our telephone relationship - this was before email was commonplace - until December of that year. His return was to be my salvation. Campus was plagued with deaths that semester, and I desperately needed some reassurance. The Genius couldn't provide it. He showed up on Monday of finals week and told me he had no love inside him for me or anything else. He was dropping out of grad school to be with his family, and I was not a part of his plans. I was devastated. I withdrew from all my classes and very nearly didn't return to college. I slept and cried the month of Christmas break and returned, slowly, to sanity, and then I returned to school to find our campus wired to the Internet. I'm happy I had The Genius while I had him. I got my love of 20th Century Classical from him, and my view of found objects. I don't begrudge him anymore for helping drive me to the brink, because now that I've been there, jumping over isn't where I want to go.
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