R___ was my favorite college girlfriend. We were both committed athletes and both cadets, and if I hadn’t been such a pigheaded asshole about the nature of our relationship, I’m quite sure that it could’ve lasted. As it was, we spent a lot of time together, dating in a traditional sense, going to local restaurants and just talking. I enjoyed her company tremendously.
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| Company E-1 led by the firsties of the Class of 1995. |
We’d been together a few weeks when I took her to a local Mexican place one Saturday night. We sat and held hands while we talked about what we each wanted from our lives. Our visions of the future weren’t so different, but neither were we pretending that what we had was going to last a lifetime. We were mostly just out to have a good time, and we were both too young and too stupid to realize how rare and precious it is when you meet someone with whom you connect right away. I never had to pretend with R___, and I never had to work to make conversation. A certain part of me thought that this was the norm, though, and out of sheer ego, I let myself take one of the best people I’d ever known for granted.
As R___ herself said one night in the early going, “No one’s in love here.”
Being a guy, and macho, I was only too quick to agree.
But this inevitably changed over the course of our weeks together, until that night when we found ourselves alone at dinner holding hands. R___ was telling me about the struggles of her day when she accidentally blurted, “I feel like I’ve finally found the one, but I don’t—” and then she caught herself before she could say any more.
She stared at me for a moment in horrified silence, clearly wondering how I was going to react.
I ignored her slip in its entirety.
“You were telling me about your Physics class?” I said, prompting a change in subject.
She let it drop. Whatever else we were, we would remain just “friends,” though with benefits. Being a guy, I assumed that I’d get the upper hand in the arrangement.
To her credit, though, R___ was a nineteen-year-old West Pointer in full command of her own identity. She was a woman, sure, but she was a confident one. She didn’t need me to feel confident about herself. So when I demurred on being “the one," it left R___ free to play the field. I shouldn’t have held this against her because if our positions had been reversed, I would certainly have done exactly what she did. This was the reason why I’d demurred on commitment. I couldn’t fool myself about it. But I also couldn’t move past it after the fact. I’d had every chance to say my piece, to tell R___ exactly how I really felt, and in the end, I got exactly what I asked for.
I got hurt.
We had some great times. That we could have had more but didn’t was a mistake I would have to carry forward. I would have to learn to speak my piece, to decide what I wanted and to go after it, or I would never be happy anywhere outside of a swimming pool.
* * *
I’d mostly recovered from mono by December and was thus able to swim myself back into shape over the course of the swim team’s Christmas training trip. We wound up in Fort Lauderdale that year, after Coach Bosse caught a bunch of the guys drinking in Puerto Rico my yearling year, the one year that I skipped the trip to stay home with my parents. Puerto Rico had previously been an unending party, but in the aftermath of the guys getting busted, we were forced to treat the trips like the serious business they were always intended to be.
I wouldn’t have minded that kind of intense focus in previous years, but as a firstie in the middle of the worst season of my career, I found it tough to stay on task. My friend Ward and I walked out to get dinner in town one night, where we split a giant plate of Cajun-style crawfish and a few pitchers of beer, and I met R___ for one magical night in the backseat of her father’s car down by the beach. I was lucky there in that her family happened to live in South Florida. Mostly, though, I swam my ass off. Conditions were immensely challenging physically, with Fort Lauderdale’s outdoor pool swept continuously by stiff winds coming off the chilly December ocean, but ten days of intense physical routine put me back into form whether I wanted it or not. By the time the Patriot League Championships rolled around, I was able to get back onto the podium in the 100 Fly and to tie my friend Matt in the 200 Fly down to the hundredth of a second. We wound up co-champions, which suited me perfectly.
I made it to the finals at Easterns in the 200 Fly a couple of weeks later for the first and only time in my entire career. I had a decent swim in prelims, going something like 1:51 and perhaps even registering an all-time personal best. I lost focus that night, though. With the end of my collegiate career looming after a year in which swimming had been more job than calling, I simply could not get my head together. I wound up finishing with something like a 1:53 in the finals, putting me dead last. Ironically, half of the field from that last heat of finals in the 200 Butterfly had also been in the finals of the Florida State Championships four years earlier.
For better or worse, my athletic glory all lay behind me. I got out of the pool, and Ray shrugged and then smiled. I shrugged back but couldn’t quite match his smile. I threw my goggles into a nearby trashcan, and that was it.
I didn’t swim again until 2007.
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