Well good times come and good times go,
I only wish the good times would last a little longer
I think about the good times we had, and why they had to end…
-Social Distortion, “Story of My Life”
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The most momentous decision of my life took place on a concrete bench in the middle of the Clarion University campus. It was graduation day 2006. College life had just ended, and a new one was about to begin for everyone walking out of the gymnasium doors with mortarboards in hand. But for me it was a little bit more than that.
At the beginning of the semester, I had dumped my boyfriend of two and a half years. I had been miserable with the guy for a while, and initially blamed the misery on the fact that the relationship was long-distance. But when we started spending more time together over the summer, I realized we had very little in common and this was certainly not the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. My friends were aware of the situation and advised as good friends do, but it took a little extra nudge for me to make the break. Specifically, it took a friend I’ll call AJ saying, when asked what he wanted for his upcoming birthday, “I want Jen to dump her douche of a boyfriend. THAT would be an excellent present.”
And so a few days later, while standing at the corner of Boardwalk and 9th in Ocean City, overlooking a foggy Atlantic, I sent AJ a text saying I got him his present. He would tell me later that they were at the Loomis when my message came through, some guy started buying him rounds in celebration of the news. While he didn’t remember anything about the rest of the night, AJ woke up the next day fully clothed in his bathtub, feeling like a million bucks.
It was a great semester, and there were noticeable changes in both of us. AJ and I had only one class together, an elective Intro to Pop Culture (a life changing class in and of itself, but more on that later). I always sat in the front in all my classes; AJ, by contrast, was always in the back.
Except in that class.
Pretty soon the guy who used to sleep right up to the start of his classes (and sometimes through his morning ones) was showing up early to sit on the steps of Founders Hall, where I just happened to go to read before classes. In Pop Culture, he took it upon himself to talk to the prof ahead of time so we’d be assigned to the same team for group projects, so as the semester went on there was a lot of time spent in the library as well- though, to be fair, we talked more about music, books, family, plans, and basically everything else than we did about our projects. When my now-ex boyfriend started acting very creepy and stalker-ish, AJ made a point to walk me to my car whenever he could and made sure one of my other friends or professors kept an eye out when he couldn’t. As the semester went on, occasionally we’d grab lunch to go from the Wendy’s across the street and walk together part way as we headed to our afternoon classes. One day when I got really sick on campus and actually had to go down to the nurse’s office, who skipped class and hiked all the way across campus to find me and make sure I was ok? Yep. That was AJ.
We graduated at the end of that fall semester on a fairly warm day for mid-December. I remember there was no snow on the ground, and though it had been overcast skies for most of the afternoon the sun had come out by the time we met up at the concrete bench. He had an important question, and I had an important decision to make, for you see, there was another side to this story.
For years, I had been very good friends with a guy named Scott. It had started when I was still at Penn State, when a friend caught me in the student union saying “I just met the perfect guy for you.” She was right. As the years went by, our friendship deepened to the point where I readily admitted to my other friends that if I hadn’t been dating someone else, I’d definitely be dating Scott. AJ knew about this. This statement was actually the catalyst that led me to tell AJ how unhappy I was in the first place.
So let’s go back a minute. Remember the text I sent on AJ’s birthday? There was a second one that went to Scott. One that was immediately answered, and sparked a chain of texting that went on from my walk back up the boardwalk and into the wee hours of the night. One that eventually led to my going out to Cleveland to see him and that later that fall led to our first dates.
One of the deeper conversations I had that fall with both AJ and Scott was the idea of dating friends. One one hand, being able to be friends first meant you already enjoyed each others’ company, most likely have things in common, and usually have a less obstructed viewpoint as to the friend’s real personality. On the other hand, if it doesn’t work out, you can lose someone you care about very much. Once you cross the line into more-than-friends, you can’t ever go back to the way things were. So you have to be careful about those kinds of decisions. And sometimes, you cross the lines without even realizing it until you’re stuck and have to make a choice. Late that fall, Scott and I consciously made the choice to cross the more-than-friends line, but it was still early enough in the relationship that I wasn’t sure where it would lead, if anywhere. We weren’t boyfriend/girlfriend yet. He was in Cleveland. I was in the middle of Pennsylvania, and with graduation now over I had the whole world in front of me.
Meanwhile, as we left the gym, AJ was about to head home to Pittsburgh. He was telling me about a part-time job he had lined up while he figured out where he wanted to go from there. We were supposed to be making our way back to meet up with our families, but instead we got to talking about plans for the future and slowly making our way farther and farther from the crowds, until suddenly we were at the concrete bench and he asked “So what are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure,” I remember saying. “I mean, there’s a lot of things I could do…”
“No, that’s not…” He frowned. “I guess what I’m asking is, what is going to make you the most happy?”
A breeze blew a chill through the December sunshine. Something dawned on me just then, all the things that had been said without ever being spoken aloud, and when I looked up it his eyes I knew without a doubt I was right. It was terrifying, because in that moment I knew somewhere along the line we had unintentionally crossed that point past mere friendship. That meant two of my closest friends were past the friendship stage, and now I had to make a choice. I had no idea which was going to be the right decision. I hesitated.
What is going to make you the most happy?
A million thoughts ran through my head all at once. There seemed to be no cohesion as they jumped from jobs to families to houses with rooms full of books, rainy days splashing in the park to retirement and back again. Over all of this was a sense of panic and doubt. What was going to make me happy? Somewhere out of the whole mess I heard my voice say quietly, “Well, Cleveland, I suppose.”
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This weekend I stopped in Clarion on my drive back to visit my family. It’s been a few years since I was on campus last, so I took a few minutes to walk around. Founders Hall with its wide front steps is exactly how I remember it, as is the path leading past the bell tower and up to the library. The concrete bench, however, was torn out in the name of progress when the math and science building was expanded a few years back. Part of me was sad that the monument to that decisive moment is no more, but another part of me finds it fitting – life is nothing more but a series of moments and decisions that, once made, we move on from forever; there’s no turning back. Like the moment where I watched one life walk away so I could start another one, the bench is part of the past that we’ve all moved on from, and part of the memories and experience we’ve all learned and grown from. I wonder sometimes how things might have been different if I made a different choice, but over all I think I made the right decision for me. Like other pioneers seeking their fortunes in the west, I’ve dealt with my share of hardship, but I’ve also had incredible joy. I do miss AJ from time to time, and hope he found happiness too. But if I had to do it again, I’d probably make the same decision I did then.
And Scott and I got married last summer, so that’s one gamble that paid off in the end.
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