Strings, Part 2

Into the wilderness: Story 45

Here’s another string I didn’t pull.

It’s a handsome young man, military, muscled, groomed. He sat next to me in Middle English Language and Literature. He broadcasted unfiltered masculinity; he also was an English major. We became friends, often sitting on the grass of the University’s central grounds in front of the library. We’d talk about literature, mostly, and our futures. I wanted to be an English professor, an ambition I knew would not come to be as I spoke it. He had been recruited by the government’s “special services,” which I understood somehow to be the CIA. Immediately after graduation, he was flying to West Germany to learn “languages.” This is why he was in Middle English- understanding the roots of Germanic language facilitated learning to speak it. This was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germany still existed.

I liked him. I liked his clean cut meatiness and the intelligence the muscles did not initially portray. I’m pretty sure he liked me too, but he had a girlfriend. We’d talk in the prairie sunshine, our life strings pulling us away from one another instead of toward. Unlike my fanciful ambitions, his girI studied nursing. She would go with him. They were a thing.

Yet, he sat next to me in class, on the grounds, in the cafeteria. I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt the frisson.

We never crossed the invisible lines between us. I didn’t tell him how I felt. And he didn’t tell me. We both knew our strings didn’t cross, though we fancied jumping over.

My string wrapped around me like a shroud. I woefully respected commitment, and still do. I would not be the woman who crossed another woman. My principles determined this future, rather than my desires.

There would be no travel to Germany, no life as a military wife, no angst from life with a man who couldn’t tell me what he did. Instead, I’d leave for Hawaii to delay entering adulthood. I’d take classes at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, make friends I didn’t keep in touch with after I left. I’d eat too many cookies in the cookie store where I worked. I’d eat dinners with my best friend’s grandmother and befriend an 89-year-old gentleman whose family worried I was wooing him for a sugar daddy.

After 6 months, I’d leave the islands for New York City, a new string unfurling an entirely new dimension. I’d begin my first professional job and learn sadly about the patriarchal systems that tie women’s ambitions to hardship.

As I look back on these decisions, they seem hardwired rather than choices on a path. These hardwires pulled me to challenge myself in ways a traditional life never could. I broke the strings my parents had sown- that I was destined to marry and bear children, a destiny only seen through their lens, not mine. I knew my future was words, configurations of letters and sentences and paragraphs to craft meaning out of nothing.

These strings pulled and unpulled, raveled and unfurled. They are the stories I’ve lived and the stories I’ve lived to tell. These stories are my life, and I have many more to share.

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