Colin

Brooke Ramos

On the day I met Colin, I was wearing a red knit hat from Marshall’s, the kind they sell for $5 near the register that already has bits of lint and loose threads hanging from it. It was nothing remarkable, aside from being the only pop of color in my Catholic school uniform, but that’s what he zeroed in on. We were introduced by our mutual friend Emma. She did the school musicals with me and sang at the Presbyterian church choir with him on weekends. He was there to audition for our production of 42nd Street, a spectacle of a show that requires advanced tap dancing and complete abandonment of traditional presentations of heterosexual masculinity from its male leads, and he looked the part. His skinny jeans, tight button-down shirt, pristine Converse, grandiose gestures and short-on-the-sides-but-fluffy-on-top blond hair cast him in stark opposition to both the sea of women that roamed my all-girls high school and the jock types everyone dated. In the four-year span when I could call him part of my life, he always chased that goal: playing the part of the noble outsider.

He was still 16, but barely; he would get his license that March but convinced his mother to let him drive a carful of us to TGI’s Fridays in February. I was just 16, but barely; a couple months of that age were under my belt, and everything about his manner made me aware of that seven-month age gap. He was the type of teenage romanticist who shook my hand when he met me and said he was “delighted.” He played the French horn because of course he did. He spoke about his own life experiences as chapters in a fairy-tale anthology, each more fantastical than the next: a summer spent on a bus trip across the Midwest in drum corps that left him unable to walk due to shin splints, a cat named after a Russian composer, a father who was a biology PhD student in the late 80s and met Francis Crick (of Watson and Crick), and a crush on my high school’s resident lesbian, whom he called a succubus. I had to look that word up in the bathroom on my phone secretly because he decried Apple products and owned a flip phone. In 2017.

His oddities were not just personality quirks or funny anecdotes. Anything by the book was inauthentic or unimpressive. When I took him to our neighborhood coffee shop to confess my girlish crush on him and ask him on a date, he retaliated by telling me he was spending 10 months of his senior year of high school on exchange in the Philippines. When we got into a fender-bender in the middle school parking lot in a rush to make a 7 p.m. performance of Shrek Jr., he ignored my pleas to just leave a note on the victim’s windshield and insisted that we wipe away the chipped paint with our jackets and a water bottle (and miss half of the first act). When I told him I loved him, even after he’d broken my heart by not reciprocating my feelings and then moving across the globe, he’d tell me I was “swell” or “not that bad;” the response depended on how much of his attention I’d meant to feel like I’d siphoned that day.

I’d always thought that if I surrounded myself with interesting people, I too would become fascinating. Everything about his worldliness and manufactured maturity made my Dickensonian childhood feel trite, so I made myself a blank canvas to which only he could offer the faintest dreams of color. And oh, how he could paint! The tiny pencil scratchings of my inexperience would have never stood a chance against the broad brushstrokes of a savior’s complex as strong as his.

At first, it was exciting, to be someone’s masterpiece. My cluelessness had been, until that point, the most attractive thing about me, so I had kept my mouth shut and my ears open, but this was something better. I felt his respect when I discarded bits of my past self in hopes of the security of a future with him. When he came over to my grandparents’ house for dinner, I balked at the customary glass of sangria offered to me, relishing how he beamed with pride when I didn’t succumb to the horror of getting tipsy at a backyard barbecue. But as summer wasted away and his stint at Princeton (where else?) loomed ahead, my naivete had lost its luster. How could he hold my hand when it was adorned with a Crucifix bracelet, a vestige of my mindless preoccupation with religion? His patience for my personality had worn thin. Gone was the flowery language over Facebook Messenger at 2 a.m. His new brand of comfort when I cried about my parents’ divorce was to denounce marriage; his new brand of chivalry when I offered to pick up Starbucks was to mock the mundanity of buying coffee from a corporate chain.

He was the worst kind of white boy identity crisis: a big puff of smoke that leaves behind the feeling of being tricked. His disappearance was a magic trick of sorts, three-and-a-half years evaporating with the swish of a 15-minute soliloquy over WhatsApp audio. A friend of a friend later told me he had taken a gap year, moved to Colorado, and began work as a part-time construction laborer and sword-fighting apprentice. A vague Facebook post asking for song recommendations reminds me he still exists outside of my memories.

I was shocked how quickly those closest to me turned against him. My best friends cheered when I called them on Holy Thursday, weeping in my bathtub, to relay the news that he was finished with me. My lab partner from high school chemistry texted me a string of expletives when she saw him on a run at the park on the 4th of July. Each time, memories of him crying to me when his girlfriend dumped him exploded in my brain. I felt the grip of his hands on my face during panic attacks, painful but never tight enough, as I would jump to his defense. His conditioning bred a special guilt for any desire to yell along with my supporters. Any attempts to laugh along with their mockeries of him were quieted by grief.

The funeral for his tarnished character ended on a September phone call with our friend Emma. Something snapped as she relayed his claim that we had mutually realized the friendship had run its course and parted on good terms. In that moment, he took on the most basic identity of all: liar. So when we did a shot in his memory on Halloween, seven months after the split—punctuated with drunken hysterics over the three sharpened pencils he used to keep in his pocket—I raised my glass and let the liquor burn my throat with the rest of them.