A prayer to my ex-fling

Miss Manners says that etiquette recognizes only three classes of relationship: marriage, engagement and friends.

I just found out that a friend of mine died more than a year ago. Only he wasn’t a friend, he was a fling on two occasions, more than a year apart. We didn’t keep in touch between those times, and we didn’t keep in touch after them. I found out about the man he grew into, the countless acts of good he did in his social justice profession, and the reality of what I had only suspected about his hard childhood from his obituary.

We met as teenagers at a conference. He pursued me more fearlessly and openly than anyone I’d ever known. When I finally gave in to this relentless guy with the goofy smile and the pretty body, who danced so gracefully it pained you to watch, it drove me nuts that his shamefully obvious tactics were working on my sophisticated teenage self, but at the same time I was giving in with glee.

You couldn’t be around this guy and not be happy. Literally, even if you were trying to remain mad or sad, just to yank his chain, he’d mug and sing and caper and tickle and you’d find yourself not only laughing, but just slightly bewildered that such a simply happy creature as Joe could exist. He wasn’t perky, or trying to appear happy. He was happy. He carried happiness and hurt inside him at the same time, but they never clouded one another, and like oil and water, the happiness stayed on top.

I’m not surprised that he ended up making such a well-deserved name for himself in the movement he chose, but the accomplishment that was for him makes his death all the more unfair. Joe wasn’t one of those kids who know twenty colleges by the time they’re in middle school, who grow up knowing their GPAs and can’t fail unless they’ve got a needle in each arm and a news camera on them. He had it harder. In the back of my mind, I’d sort of figured he’d be someone’s baby daddy by now, working at a video store. Not because he didn’t work hard, but just because working hard and meaning every smile you give often aren’t enough.

I always meant to look him up someday, see what he’s up to. I wondered if I’d be able to track him down. Then I get this email from my friend, titled “Sad news,” and what do you know, Joe is all over the Internet. Moving testimonies, and bad poems, and mentions on the blogs of people who never even once touched him, and weirder still, many pages that talk about him as if he were still alive, because he was. More than a year ago. “Joe will be speaking tomorrow.” “Joe says to believe.”

I haven’t seen or heard from Joe in one, two—eight years. We were fifteen and then we were sixteen. I don’t know a single thought he had between that time and now, or then and October 29, 2004. I don’t know if he prayed, or hurt anyone badly, or fell in love. I don’t know if he ended up speaking to his parents, the ones who almost every post-death mention carefully notes abused him. They’ve lost a son, a better one than they deserved, and now they have this to live down in front of the whole world. Maybe they’re dead, too, and reconciling with him in some way beyond our understanding.

I have this clichéd need to speak to Joe “just one more time.” I doubt I mattered to his life one bit, but that doesn’t matter. I want him to know I’m in awe of the person he became while I spent the same number of years, and more than one year more, without achieving that kind of balance and generosity toward others. Without really concerning myself about achieving it. In one article, they said he went to the conference where we met “because there’d be girls there,” and that made me feel acknowledged, feel remembered, as my small role in his life doesn’t deserve.

I believe that the dead, the good dead, are allowed to know things we don’t, that their reward is to be anywhere and with anyone, if they want to be. I’m trying to admit to myself that I’m about to say a prayer to my ex-fling, now one whole year younger than I am.

Joe, I’m so proud of everything you did. Look at all the people who loved and admired you. I want you to know that you made me happy. I’m sad now, but I’m smiling a little because I realize what a good thing it was to have known you. I didn’t miss you before I knew that you were gone. (I’m a little embarrassed about writing this. Are you thinking I’m overreacting? Quite a lot of emotional ink to waste on a long-ago fling? Anyway.) I don’t miss you now, not exactly, but I’m aware of you, who you were and who you still are. I’m thinking you’ll be in the back of my mind for quite some time.

If I’m somewhere in a little corner of yours, I’m grateful. If some tiny idea of me is up there with you, I feel blessed.

Take care.