Out Of My League

There was a girl in my freshman class that ended things. I only knew of her demise third-hand. She’d transferred abroad by then, and it was months later — through a conversation with a well-traveled mutual friend — that the news trickled back to me. I was stunned.

She was part of a small clique of students that arrived on campus fully formed, looking and behaving like proper adults, transported from another time when eighteen meant maturity, meant accepting your place in the world. This she did gracefully, elegantly, like Lauren Bacall soft-lit in black and white.

The rest of us — most of us, my crew — were still grubby kids, trying to figure out the tricks of regular laundering, nutrition beyond caffeine and nicotine, nail-trimming, hair-combing, and a modicum of basic hygiene. It was months before I realized that sleeping in your combat boots could be bad both for your feet, and your boots.

I only spoke to her once, heading back from some sort of poetry reading organized by the foreign language department. She read something in French and I didn’t understand a word of it. But on the way up to campus she was walking a few steps ahead of the rest of us, stepping silently while our Doc Martens scuffed the sidewalk, while we rattled on with inside jokes and jabs.

Always keen-fearing for the left-out, I scooted ahead and told her that I liked her reading, that it was beautiful. This was a guess, a gamble. The piece could have been vulgar, dreary, trite, pedestrian. I didn’t know. I just liked the way she read it. The words were lost on me, but she found my unexpected compliment kind and heartening and responded with a flattered smile.

It was at that moment that I realized there was something else to the story, that she was more than sweater-set perfection dutifully completing required classes, awaiting a sinecured ascension to some minor corner of American aristocracy. Things were not so simple.

Shy (continually, perpetually) in the face of female beauty, I slunk back to my pack, sparked up a Parliament and left her on her way. She was out of my league — this was certain — and that brief exchange was courage enough for one day’s trepidation.

Rarely does a week go by when I’m not reminded of some old friend, colleague, former associate who’s off doing great things, publishing a piece, speaking at a conference, consulting with top-tier clients, pulling in a salary with another zero behind it. And I wonder at it all. I wonder why I’m not there, why I’m not doing those things. It all seems so out of my league.

And rarely does a season go by without news of the opposite, without some tidbit in an email or a text about a failure, a hang-up, a legal imbroglio, a fall from grace, or a life cut short. And I wonder at it all. Could that be me? Am I safe from their league?

So I go back and retrace my steps, try to figure out how I arrived waylaid at this mid-way, medium place. I ask myself if I should have done more, if there’s still more to do.

And sometimes I think I should have kept up the conversation on that damp Pennsylvania afternoon, that I should have made a few introductions, chatted about professors and assignments and other middling common collegiate things. Would that have made a difference? Would such simple kindness have nudged things in a different direction? Would it next time?

Maybe a little human connection is all that it takes, all that we need. A reminder, a reassurance — that in the end we’re all batting about blindly, taking our best swing, in the same league.