When the Thing that You Long for is Not What You Want By Laura J. Oliver

I leave at 3:20, having not yet taught myself to check the traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge hours before any intention to cross it, and so, already marginally late to my college reunion—and this is a big year for my class—I am stopped bumper to bumper. It takes me an hour to creep along the next six miles to the bridge for no reason other than rain and rush hour on a Friday. I have another hour to drive beyond that.

I’m good at immediately accepting the things I can’t change without handwringing or complaint, which is true tonight. I ease forward a few feet to escape the Barker Paint Company van and turn up the music. The smell of weed emanates so virulently through closed windows I’ll be high before Centreville if we remain in these lanes neck and neck. I glance over, and the driver smiles, raises his eyebrows, and nods laconically. The minutes I could be reuniting with my class are evaporating. I put a book on Audible and wait it out.

When I arrive an hour and a half late, in the pouring rain, the building is locked. I can see my classmates inside, sitting at round tables, wine and appetizers before them, listening to a speaker, but the door won’t budge. This is starting to feel dangerously like metaphor, and my equanimity is cracking. I mutter, “Maybe I just wasn’t supposed to be here tonight,” but I say it with a self-pitying pout. Aware of this, I circle the building looking for another way in, knowing that, too, is metaphor for my college experience; only my exclusion then was self-imposed.

Eventually, I find an open door and there is someone to greet me with my nametag on a lariat. I slip into the nearest seat, gazing longingly at the bar and caterer’s spread behind the speaker. The shrimp cocktail looks fresh, and a glass of Pinot Noir wouldn’t hurt. I look around the room and can identify no one. The only person I might recognize, my boyfriend from freshman year, I know immediately, isn’t here. He is six foot 4. He’d stand out even sitting down.

When the speaker concludes, everyone rises and mingles and that’s when I start to recognize classmates. Debbie’s kind eyes, Paula’s megawatt-Midwestern smile. I’m casually looking for my friend, and anyone I ask says, “Oh, he was just here!” As late as I was, perhaps he thought I wasn’t coming. I keep looking.

The greatest thrill is to look up and see my freshman-year roommate for the first time since graduation. She was a better friend to me than I to her and that has grieved me. I was a loner and had never shared a room in my life. I don’t know if I literally drew a line down the middle when we moved in, but I may have.

She looks exactly as I would imagine and has the same ready laugh. She got married at 39 and had a baby at 45, she reports. We do the math to see if we should introduce him to my youngest daughter.

“I hear you became a writer,” someone says. “I remember you wanted to be one,” and I say, “I have been lucky. That’s a dream that came true.” At the expense of other dreams, but I don’t add that.

I continue to ask for my friend. “He was here a second ago,” I hear again. “He’s wearing black.” A minute later, I hear, “He was over there by the doors. He’s wearing gray.” See how fast our witnessing becomes perspective, not fact? Was he here at all?

Everyone else has come for the entire weekend, so they are going to reconvene at a bar on High Street to get the party really started. I am driving home—back across the rainy bridge. I won’t be back for the game tomorrow. I have seen what I wanted to see, experienced, and discovered what I longed to know. We are okay. We turned out all right.

And as I drive back, I realize I’m not at the bar tonight because I’m still a non-joiner—a writer who observes as she participates–whose picture was somehow omitted from our yearbook, so there’s no record of me having been here though one of my professors attended my wedding. Why didn’t I drive to Florida with Paula on Spring Break? Go to more parties? Cheer at lacrosse games?

We are who we were, I think, as I hit the bridge. But shouldn’t life have changed us? Are you now who you were then?

My missing friend calls me the next day. “Where are you?” I ask, not “Where were you,” because that doesn’t matter now. Once again, I’m quick to let go of unchangeable loss. “I was late,” I explain, “I drove for hours, but I came, and I looked for you.”

“I’m in Connecticut,” he says, “I had to get outta there. Too many old people.”

We laugh. Exchange updates on our families. I ask about his wife, their kids, and how they spend their days. We plan to meet next year though we may not. Anything could happen between now and then.

Reencountering the past leaves me wistful. You never know when you see someone, whether you will ever see them again. Only our future selves recognize last times as last times.

But I am smiling as I write this, and I know what I would have said had I joined my classmates at that High Street bar. Had I been someone I’m not.

I would have raised a glass and hugged the person closest to me. I’d have said,” I’m so glad that I came tonight, I’m so happy to see everyone!”

And I would be thinking: because in spite of myself, you feel like my family.

And I wish that I’d known you.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.