donny osmond

Another in a series of stories from when I was 20 years old, in celebration of the upcoming 10th anniversary of my 20th birthday.

I was in love for a couple of months when I was 20. It was purely accidental. I walked into work one morning and the guy who did the shift before me had a friend visiting from the next town over. I had been up all night at the Star Wars premiere and really just wanted to crash on the couch in the break room for an hour before my shift. But there was already someone sleeping on it.

“Wake him up.” My friend shrugged. “He’s been asleep for a few hours.”

Instead I balled up my coat and laid down in the floor. About an hour later someone was shaking me to wake up and I opened my eyes and saw M for the first time. He was kind of grinning at me and I just thought “Huh, he’s cute.”

We both did the same thing for a living. We both liked all the same bands. We both dyed our hair a lot. He was about six months younger than me, but that didn’t really matter. He was funny and silly and decidely not like most of the people I was running around with that year. He was without pretension and I instantly liked him.

It seemed to go both ways because he started calling me at work once and awhile. Or randomly showing up to visit the guy before me, but staying until I came in at 5am. And then staying until the office opened later on. One night later that summer I got a call from T at work telling me we were going to a concert, that M was coming, that I’d best get my ass down there. We danced. We went up on the bus of one of the opening bands because M had done a show with them in his town. They wanted to show him their Jager tap. I wanted to try the Jager tap. We fell off the bus.

T had to get to work and asked me to go get him some food, and to drop M back at his car. After delivering the food, I asked M if he wanted to see the club where I worked and he did. We drove over and took a tour and sat on the trunk of my car in the back parking lot talking until one of us got the courage. I don’t remember who kissed who. It doesn’t matter. In a flurry he invited me to come up and go to another show with him where he lived. I agreed and figured I’d work it out.

I remember being nervous about seeing him again. And at first it was just like it had always been, just him joking with me and acting like we were friends. I met a bunch of people he worked with and as I was getting ready to leave he spun me around in front of everyone and laid one on me.

We tried. It wasn’t the distance that was the problem. An hour each way. I went up to see him on a whim many many times. I went to work events with him. He came down to see me. We talked on the phone. We traded tapes. We wrote letters. We made a really cute couple. It wasn’t even that our friends didn’t get a long. It was something else entirely and I didn’t even realize it.

He left. Not me, not really. He left to go on this long trip. To meet his family. To go see where he came from. He called a few times while he was gone and then I didn’t hear anything. And I came to work one morning and there was a gift for me. He’d brought it in but didn’t stay to see me. Didn’t return my calls.

I guess I’d always known that there was a reason that our relationship never felt, I don’t know, official. Like it always felt temporary and fleeting. Not like a dream so much as like I know that this is only going from point A to point B and then I’ll be getting off the train and we’re not going to be going to the same place. Maybe I knew he was gay before he did and I was just willing him not to figure it out for himself.