Click

There was a violent gang problem at the junior high school I was supposed to attend, so my parents open enrolled me at the next school over, just too far away to walk to. My mother drove me to school in the mornings, and my father picked me up every afternoon. When the bell rang at the end of my last class, I’d collect my books from my locker, rush outside, and eagerly watch the parents’ cars arrive. I couldn’t get away from junior high fast enough.

For the first few days, I was troubled by spurts of false hope. One mother had a Nissan Sentra, dark red, the same model and color as my father’s car. I could not consciously see any difference between the two cars. She usually arrived a few minutes before my father did, so that when she turned the corner into the parking lot, I got all excited, ready to go home, until she got close enough for even a nearsighted kid like me to see who was driving. My heart leapt up, then crashed back into my stomach, and I was trapped at the junior high school for five more incredibly long minutes. She didn’t always arrive first, though. Sometimes my father got there first, so my hopes stayed high, and my disappointment crushing. After a week, though, I found the solution in my subconscious mind. Until the car pulled right up to the curb, I had no logical way to know whether it was my father coming to take me home, or Decoy Mom there to disappoint me. Still, if I could calm myself down enough to feel it, I noticed that something clicked into place in my mind when the car turning that corner really was my father’s car, the one I’d ridden in for years and often looked for in the garage to tell me whether he was home. It was the click of familiarity. I don’t know what I was seeing—a scratch on the headlights, perhaps, or the movement of that particular set of wheels and shocks over the cracked pavement—but when I felt the click, I knew that car was there for me.

As my life goes on, I’ve noticed the click in other situations, and I’ve used it often to inform me or comfort me. It’s most pronounced with people. When I think I see a good friend across the mall, or an ex-boyfriend on the street, I watch the person walk, shift weight, move hands, turn, for just a moment. I’m not consciously looking for anything. I’m relaxing my conscious mind, waiting for the click. If this is someone who means something to me, part of my mind will recognize some little detail—the shape of Rachel’s eyes, maybe, or the way Brian’s feet turn out when he walks—and I’ll know without a doubt who I’m seeing. This is a common experience. I’m only surprised now when I expect a click and don’t feel one.

Last Saturday, when the air in Colorado was a balmy six degrees Fahrenheit, my friend Brian and I went snowshoeing on a trail just west of Boulder. We trudged through a meadow and into a forest, marveling at views of snow-frosted mountains. When my legs started to wear out, we turned around and retraced our tracks. As we stepped out of the forest, me first because Brian suggested that I, being less tough and more tired, should set the pace going back, I saw four more people toddling towards us on snowshoes.

“It’s Anita!” the head of their line sang out. I could tell that the voice was a man’s, but I didn’t recognize it. Nothing clicked. I watched him as he lead his group across the meadow and stopped two feet away from me—a space invasion for a stranger, but a comfortable distance for a close friend. The rest of his group, who I saw now were all women, stopped in a line behind him. “How are you doing, Anita?” he asked, friendly, charming, warm.

“Great!” I said, trying to match his familiar tone, but I kept staring, trying frantically to figure out who he was. He was bundled up for the weather in a black stocking cap and gloves, a forest green parka, and polarized orange ski goggles that covered half of his face. The other half was sprinkled with dark brown stubble. Still, I felt I should recognize anyone who was so happy to see me. He was small for a man, about my height, thin, and moved with athletic grace. I thought of my former boss, Joe, but Joe was a close friend of Brian’s, and would have called out to Brian, too. Also, Joe would have clicked. This wasn’t Joe. I had no idea who this was.

“Please tell me that the snow gets deeper as we go on,” the man said cheerily.

“Well…”

“No, not really,” Brian admitted for me. The snow was too shallow for snowshoeing, actually. The teeth on the bottoms of our snowshoes had scraped rocks from time to time, and the ground peeked through around the roots of some trees.

“But the view is gorgeous!” I added, still staring, looking the man up and down. As my eyes rested on his parka, it clicked for me right before he pulled off his goggles to reveal sparkling green eyes. “Oh, Ron!” I blurted out. “I didn’t recognize you at all! I recognized your jacket first, but…”

I quickly introduced Brian, reminding Ron what I’d told him in years past, that Brian was a guitarist and a buddy I’d met while working at Sounds True. Then I introduced Ron to Brian. “Brian, this is Ron, my ex-boyfriend from,” I scanned the three women, realizing that at least one of them probably thought she was his girlfriend, “years and years ago.” I remembered that Ron had always hated it when I introduced him that way, as my boyfriend when he was and later as my ex, but I suddenly realized that I had no other way to explain why I knew him. That was the full extent of our relationship. Brian was my former co-worker, my guitar teacher, a client whose cat I had cared for, a musician I admired, and one of my best friends. Ron was simply my ex.

Ron quickly sang off the names of his companions, waving vaguely towards them as he did. Now that Ron and I had finally expanded the conversation beyond the two of us, Brian asked the women if they knew of other good places for snowshoeing. One of them—their names had blown away from me in the rushed introduction—suggested Bear Lake. Then we all nodded and smiled and started off in opposite directions. “It was good to see you again,” said Ron, still wearing his charming smile.

“You too!” I called back. The warm, welcome feeling stayed on me as we stomped up a hill, but then I remembered the relationship I’d had with Ron, which I hadn’t thought of in the months since I’d finally stopped speaking to him, stopped pretending I could be his friend. The pain of trying too hard to prove that I was good enough for him, always feeling that I’d failed, for a year and a half as his girlfriend and two years as we tried to transition into friendship, came flooding back. “Wow,” I said loudly, so that Brian could hear me over the crunching of our snowshoes, “it’s amazing how much he still pisses me off.”

Brian told me that wasn’t too surprising, and he launched into his own story of a cheating ex-girlfriend who threw him away years ago, but who still pulled him down into depression when he ran into her again. As we toddled back to his car, on the ride back into Boulder, and over curry dinners at a Thai restaurant, we talked on and on about old relationships. We wondered what our significant others could have been thinking, analyzed our embarrassments, and marveled at how much we could still suffer from them years later. “I guess the only way to really get over someone you’ve loved is to fall in love with someone else,” Brian said.

I’m not sure I agree. I had misspoken earlier: It wasn’t really Ron who pissed me off. Ron made me feel welcome and cozy in a detached sort of way, like the great party host that he is. I’m clearly not over the story—it still upsets me whenever any little thing reminds me of it—but as for Ron himself, Ron the real person whose life is going on entirely without me, he doesn’t even click for me anymore. My life has gone on without him, too. I wonder if Brian’s statement was simply inside out: Maybe, now that the click is gone, I’ll finally be able to click with someone else.