soldier boy
I promised this particular post to a friend. ‘For someone who professes never to have been in love, you sure do write about it a lot.' And to that, I can only say this: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, well, we find no other recourse but to take up the pen.
And yes, maybe you’re right. Maybe the problem isn’t gender. Maybe it’s geography.
This is from the “travel” diaries. If you actually know what that means, well good for you, and now hush up.
Soldier Boy
Names are funny things, aren’t they? They’re given to us almost arbitrarily, and yet somehow, we find ourselves trying to fit into the space they hold. Or we change them just enough, just so they can shrink or stretch to fit us. Sometimes, it even works.
I never called him by his real name. It was hard on my tongue, the shape of it too jagged and strange and foreign. And besides, that’s not how he introduced himself. I didn’t learn his real name until much later.
I wonder now if that would have made a difference.
To us, in the beginning, he was just Tom. He was a simple Dutch country boy from a small town in the Netherlands who joined the military when he was eighteen. It’s funny, but now that I think about it, I never asked him why he wanted to be a soldier. Perhaps he had not been studious enough to gain a place at university. Perhaps he wanted to assert his manhood in some primal, basic way. Perhaps, at some point, he really did harbor the kind of patriotism that bred martyrs and heroes.
I really don’t know him enough to hazard a guess.
I only know the parts of him he let me see. I knew that he was independent and searching for adventure. I knew he smiled a gap-toothed smile. I knew he dressed fastidiously, his vanity tripping lightly in the way he wore his pants and in the fit of his green shirts. I knew he was a competent flirt whose flirting seemed to have been brought on by either necessity or circumstance, rather than real desire. And he was tall, my lure of lures. He was light-haired, and blue-eyed, and sturdily built.
Our strange, disjointed courtship makes for a great story. We met in London. We walked side by side under the stars, by the foot of the alps in Switzerland. We flirted clandestinely in Rome. We danced together by the waters of Venice. He spun me around the beer halls in Munich. We shared a table in a little restaurant in Florence. We drank cheap beers in a bar in Prague. We ate Belgian fries in the middle of the night in Amsterdam. And we talked about everything, everywhere.
He was smart in his own way of course - he had a depth borne not out of classrooms, but of the way he had lived his life. He was admirably efficient, thoughtful, confident, self-reliant. He seemed so incredibly anchored, and yet he wasn’t tied down to any single place. He was uncommitted, unfettered, and yet so gloriously at home with the world. He had a quirky, offbeat sense of humor that tended to catch people off guard.
It helped, of course, that he was good-looking and built with the kind of arms that can make me feel physically, wonderfully safe. It helped that he had a beautiful, secret, childlike smile. It helped that he had eyes that reminded me of the ocean. And he picked up on things about me that hardly anyone ever saw. He noticed how the edges of my accent would soften when I got tired. He was always ready with the location of the nearest internet cafe. He knew that at night, after a few shots of whiskey, I would begin to forget to think in only one language, and would sometimes pause to feel the texture of my words before I spoke.
He absolutely fascinated me. He was the first man I had been truly attracted to in such a long while.
And yet. For all his worldliness, for all his sophistication, for all the crazy adventures still unraveling in his life, he still wanted the same thing every other good man I’ve met longed for in a woman. At the end of the day, he still wanted her.
Her. That beauty of pearls and princesses and proprieties. She of kitchens and kindnesses and kittens. She of stovetops and settling downs and stay-at-homes. She of babies and baked goods and bending-over-backwards.
I’m not that girl. More to the point, I don’t want to be her. Even more to the point, he had pushed himself off his pedestal, and I was no longer of a mind to pick him up.
And really, that’s all there is to say about that.
soldier boy travel
Originally published on Tumblr, July 2010.