It took me weeks to gin up the courage to ask him out. When you are 17 and you are madly in love (in only the way a 17 year old can be) with your best guy friend and you've made the executive decision to ask him to your senior year Homecoming dance - well, that takes a lot of courage.
Note for those of you playing along? I am rarely brave.
So on a random evening, I called him. This wasn't a rare occurrence. In any given week, we likely spoke on the phone 4 or 5 times. But this call was to be different. I had worked up the courage to do it. After hours of talking this through with my best girlfriend, Wendy, I realized that I needed to do this sooner as opposed to later. The call elapsed just as most of our conversations did...the exchange of pleasantries, gossip about our friends, people not our friends and the day. As the conversation was reaching its natural end, I realized I had to do something and fast. My courage was draining out of my body quicker than a boat with a HUGE hole in it. So I did it.
"So, umm, would you want to go to Homecoming with me?"
"oh, wow, umm, well, I can't, I'm sorry" (or something to that effect, it was 21 years ago, after all)
He couldn't have gotten off the phone with me faster if he tried.
I hung up the phone and stared at the stripped wall paper in disbelief. I had done it and I had failed. Well, I didn't fail, really. The task at hand was to ask him out. I did. I just didn't get the answer that I wanted.
I felt like I had lost everything.
I had no idea what to expect the next day. We had a pattern, we'd hang out before school and then meet up with the rest of our friends for lunch. I walked into school petrified that morning. What if he never wanted to talk to me again? (spoiler alert, he did talk to me again) but the next few days were pretty uncomfy for both of us and completely nerve racking for me. If memory serves, I cried each morning on the drive to school. God bless Wendy for listening to me drone on and on and on about it.
Thus began what I have often referred to as the worst week of my life. Later that week the exhaust system would fall out of my car completely. Yeah, it wasn't good.
But what amazed me is that said best friend? We recovered. It took a few weeks. He had known for years that I liked him but he didn't like me in the same way and now we had very tangible proof of it. But we recovered. We seriously did. After a week or so it was as if it had never happened. Homecoming came and went. He went with someone else, I went with my girlfriends. We moved through the balance of our senior year of high school and I discovered that he was taking the same girl to our senior prom. No one asked me and I sure as hell wasn't going to ask someone else. LESSON LEARNED!
The night of our prom, my friend Will hosted a bunch of us for dinner at his house. His parents went all out, serving us almost with white gloves. It was pretty amazing. I got to our pre-party dressed in my finest and Will came to me with a corsage in his hand. He said, "BJ dropped this off earlier tonight for you and asked me to give it to you" and with that Will put the flowers on my wrist.
I was in shock. There he was with some other girl and he thought about me and did one of the most loving and wonderful things that anyone had ever done for me. I wore those flowers as if someone had just asked me to marry them.
Fast forward a few hours to our prom and it was a great night. Despite the fact that BJ was at the prom with his date, I would guess he spent the balance of the evening with me. I thanked him for the flowers and he smiled and blushed. At our prom that year, we had a band and a DJ and the band started into "Wonderful Tonight" which was our prom "theme" song and BJ asked me to dance. There are 3 things I remember about that dance.
1. Resting my head on his shoulder.
2. The fact that the crappy band changed up the lyrics in ways that just hurt my heart at that moment.
3 The hug BJ gave me at the end of that dance.
I knew in that moment that I was so very loved. Not in the way I *wanted* in that moment but I didn't doubt for a single second how much he loved me and cherished our friendship.
Some 10 years later he would walk me down the aisle as I married.
Some 15 years later he would apologize for breaking my heart when he was a "clueless" kid.
Some 20+1 later I wish him the happiest of happy birthdays today. I am so blessed to have such a friend in my life.
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