A ‘Stalker,’ a Disappearance, and a Couple of CPR Dummies

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XII

On my fiftieth birthday, I recall a crush from twenty-four years ago.

The essay collection I wrote in 2014 not only includes essays about boys I dated but also an essay about a boy I wish I’d dated. In spring 1999, after boyfriend number three and I broke up, I took a required health class to finish my teaching credential, and on the first day of school, I had a rare “where has he been all my life?” moment when a handsome young man walked into the room and sat down a couple seats away from me. I saw him for three hours once a week for sixteen weeks and didn’t ask him if he had a girlfriend until we were walking to the parking lot on the last day of the semester. He was still dating his high school girlfriend “unfortunately,” he said. We hugged goodbye, and I didn’t see him again for nine months.

Likeable Unpublished Essays

A couple essays in the scrap pile might be publishable with some rework. One of them is about a night two weeks before I turned thirty when my best friend and I went to our usual Irish pub and met a gorgeous twenty-three-year-old lad who only had eyes for me at a time when I was feeling washed-up. (If only I could go back twenty years and shake that thirty-year-old’s shoulders and tell her to enjoy her youth while it lasts.) I revised that essay for seven years and never tried to publish it.

The other essay—“Stalker”—is the one about the boy in my health class. I was the “stalker,” despite the target of my affection not fearing me, in part because he didn’t know I was—sort of—stalking him. (I swear I’m not unhinged, just resourceful.) That I was able to locate his whereabouts nine months after our class ended without the help of the internet and track him down in person—with a tip from a dear friend—is more impressive than creepy, if not a tad delusional.

If I tackled that essay again, I would focus on the two most noteworthy scenes: the day I followed health-class hottie to a Saturday CPR certification and the afternoon I found him on campus when I was no longer a student at the university—the last time I would ever see him.

Stalker

Here’s a section from the day I supposedly learned CPR:

Partway through the semester, our instructor informed us we needed CPR certification, so he gave us a weekend CPR training schedule. I signed up for one immediately, but the next week I overheard Mr. Right telling the teacher when he was signing up for his CPR course. I cancelled mine and rescheduled to take his. I didn’t tell him. I was jubilant I would see him an extra day out of the week—a Saturday even.

Oh my god, it’s official. I have become a stalker, I thought.

The morning of CPR training, I arrived early and sat in a chair against a wall across the room. I nonchalantly scanned strangers’ faces without making eye contact and fake-read a novel. (Smartphones would have been so convenient back then.)

Then I heard his sexy voice at the front door as he signed in with the instructor. My heart soared into my throat. When he saw me across the room, pretending I didn’t see him, peering out a window, side-glancing in his direction, he beamed. I beamed. I put on my best surprised face.

“I thought you signed up for a different day!” he said.

“I did, but then I couldn’t make it,” I lied.

We all lined up on the cold, hard floor and set up plastic CPR dummies with permanent O-shaped mouths and dead eyes. They could have easily doubled as weathered sex dolls. It was disconcerting.

Dreamboat crouched next to me, hovering over his designated lifeless synthetic body. We practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on those dummies. I watched him through my peripheral vision, his gorgeous lips blowing air into his peach-skinned doll, his strong hands compressing her rubbery chest.

Why aren’t we partnering up and testing this shit out on each other? I thought.

Yet, I still didn’t tell him how I felt, and I had the perfect in. I hadn’t always been this reserved with men, so what was stopping me? None of our other classmates were there. It was me, him, and a couple of stiffs who wouldn’t kiss back. The words “I really like you” stuck to my tongue.

Somehow I got CPR certified that day, but I was thankful to take home a brochure with a step-by-step diagram because, when I left with my official card, I could not recall anything. I had been too busy fawning over the hot boy.

How many breaths vs. compressions? How is it different for babies? Oh my god, someone is going to choke and die because I have a crush.

The One Who Got Away—or Not

The following school year, when I tracked him down on campus, passing off our run-in as a coincidence when it wasn’t, he had broken up with his girlfriend, and he almost skipped class to have dinner with me. He hesitated, looking at his watch. Then he went to class. This time I didn’t let him get away without my email address and phone number, but I didn’t ask for his. I knew he would call. He never did.

For weeks I thought maybe this was the one time in history someone actually lost a phone number, but his lack of contact could have been for any number of reasons: He was busy as a post-grad and didn’t have a job yet; he met someone else; he lived with his parents; he wasn’t as into me as I was into him! Duh.

I expended a ridiculous amount of emotional and mental energy on a fantasy. I barely knew the guy! I had done this before, and I would do it again. In my late twenties, I wasn’t totally over college heartbreak, and my confidence was shot—although, not nearly as shot as it would be in my thirties after continuing the same pattern over and over, always with the same result: a self-fulfilling prophecy of rejection. I focused on “relationships” that were “safe,” not sustainable.

The Best-Laid Plans

About a decade later, I scoured the internet to locate his whereabouts—more stalking. He was married, living in a rural town on the other side of the country, working as a used car salesman. He had a dog but no kids. In class he said he wanted to teach to have more time with his future children.

What happened to his plans? I wondered.

And what happened to mine? I only lasted as a high school English teacher for two years. I wanted children and never had them either. I have moved back into my childhood home five times as an adult. It took me a long time to recognize there’s nothing wrong with plans not working out the way we expect. Do they ever?

Still an Effective ‘Researcher’

At the end of the essay, I mention the nonexistence of “fate” and reword the concept of “sliding doors,” but, like most of my first essays, I didn’t dig deep enough into self-reflection. I do, however, still find the story funny, and when I started this blog entry, I looked up that dude again. (Have I learned nothing?) He still lives in the same state on the East Coast, but I’m not sure if he still sells cars or if he’s still married, and I don’t care anymore.

I eventually let go of the boy and the essay. I couldn’t determine how to infuse the piece with more weight without connecting it to something else, but I never figured out what that something else was, and the essay doesn’t lend anything new the reader doesn’t already know about me: I’m a dreamer; I am drawn to good-looking men who disappear; I’m adept at internet research, even when a certain person of interest, whose shirt was buttoned incorrectly the last time I saw him, isn’t on social media.

No Writing Time Is Wasted

In addition to several excised essays and chapters—I have a document of marooned paragraphs I couldn’t part with forever, determined I would someday find a use for them. I played an effective trick on my psyche. I have more than 44,000 random words of potentially usable material that I will never use. Nonwriters might consider the time spent writing these dustbin words a waste, but it never is. All craft practice is worthwhile. Writing a book means writing more than one book—and possibly several.

Status Check

After ninety-six agent rejections and twenty-four independent press rejections, my memoir is in one independent press Submittable queue and one inbox of a very generous editor who read my overview and said she wants to help me figure out where else to send the book, even though she only publishes novels. After a two-year break from querying agents, I am ready to do it again. Maybe I’ll find a home for my memoir before the ten-year mark—or at least sometime while I’m still in my fifties, which started today.