A young man's heart turns to love.  Or sex.  Or both.  There can be both.

When you want to meet the right girl, you simply walk up to her, you take her face in your hands, and you look her right in the eyes.  Say nothing, just absorb what she is feeling.  Then slowly lean forward and kiss her, gently, on the lips.  When you lean back, let your hands drop lightly to her neck, and then let go, but never take your eyes off of her.

It helps if you look like Brad Pitt or whats-his-name, that Orlando Bloom kid.

That One Time at the Library.

I was with my friend Deana...this was back in, oh, 1989 or so.  We were both in high school, and had both known one another for about six years, since we were ten or so.  We tried dating once for about four days when I was fifteen.  It didn't really work.  It didn't help that shortly after this brief period, my brother (home from the Marines) went out with her on a date (and lied to me about who he'd gone out with).  My brother, who'd dated her older sister.  My brother, the right bastard.

Anyhow, this particular day came after all that drama.  Deana was a beautiful girl: roughly my height, athletic build, dark curly hair and brown eyes (or green or blue, they changed with her outfit what with the colored contact lenses).  Her volume seemed to be stuck sort of wide-open.  She was unaware of her beauty, and acted roughly like a fourteen year old boy, loud and friendly and mischievous.  She had been in the pom / dance squad, she was on the newspaper staff at school, and she and I had the same advanced placement classes, though she also had AP calculous (I could hardly do basic math) and was in many ways far more intelligent than anyone else I knew.  She had a brand new blue RX-7 and a car phone.  She never acted the snob, intent to be a bleeding heart liberal do-gooder despite the wealth of her family and the attitudes of her friends.  There was a strength there, a wild sort of teeth bared animal thing.  Teenage girls can fuel the rotation of the earth with that untamed energy.

We spent hours on the phone talking, creating philosophy or dissecting music or gossiping about random people. Having these scary conversations where we'd flirt using our respective IQs.  It was like playing chess with a supermodel in her underwear.

She wasn't perfect, but she was as close to it as I'd ever seen at the time.  Our friendship, over time, developed into something very deep; we trusted one another, and would seek one another out during times of trouble.  I'd often felt nervous around her, the attraction hard to hide, but in time I'd figured it out and was comfortable as her friend.

So we were at the library on the New Mexico State campus.  My heart had recently been squished by the Amy monster and Deana and I were just sort of hanging out, getting away from our houses and our lives for a bit, sitting with a bunch of college kids in a lounge-type area in the library.  Acting like college kids.  Pulling it off, damn near.

She was reading out loud from a victorian-era primer on romance, the both of us sarcastically commenting and laughing at the thing, when she looked up at me, sort of laughing, eyes squinted slightly with her smile.  Se stopped laughing and just smiled, her eyes looking right through me.  My heart stopped cold.  In that brief half-second was everything I'd missed to that point, and in that one look I got to see what she actually felt for me, the sort of care she had.  And in that same instant, I knew I'd fucked up and missed it.

I spent about a week on my own, locked into a routine of school, cigarettes, coffee, and writing that produced a fifty page screed bled into a teenage journal, fifty pages of angsty regret.  It's a sort of wonder that I didn't end up a goth kid.

A couple of years later, she called me out of the blue and asked if I wanted a job with her dad. He needed a young, motivated, inexpensive geek to help put together a network and, ultimately, a business.    My first computer-related job, my first salaried position as a system operator and general technician, that first step toward wage-slave status.  Deana worked there part-time in a marketing and design capacity, hanging out sometimes when she had nothing else to do.  I'd occassionally catch her regarding me.  I would occassionally be caught regarding her.  The opportunities were years past us, buried under subsequent friendship and assumed heartache.  We shared  a secret, unspoken, and you could see it in the way we acted, how we related.  We were never single at the same time, and we would pine for one another for years.

She lives outside of Portland, last I heard, doing a gig for Intel.