Almost-love

I remember looking back at you, your face glowing in the 6am sunrise that summer of '04. One swig from your frozen Nalgene bottle, and you wiped off the excess water with your forearm, just as I believed farmers do. I remember those ever-endless rows of barley, swiping the sides of our hips, and I remember those four-wheeler rides and how you believed farming was living. And I remember that fat dog shaking off his drenched fur at the banks of the creek and your mom handing out cookies at coffee break. My friends laughed because you smiled at me, and maybe you winked. We couldn't be sure. I'd never been so tan before that summer, and I was sure it was the potato fields and the early morning hours of walking in the sun that transformed our pale complexions. You were so vivid, yet vague to me. Like the way you joked but kept your distance or the way you offered me rides home from church. Those summer nights crouched on an old wooden porch swing with a book in my hands, I often wondered what it would be like if you and I had lived in the fifties, there in Montana. Surely we'd have stayed around after high school, like our grandparents' generation.
But you still remained a perfect mystery, and better for it. We had growing up to do, far away from dusty dirt roads and walking miles through the fields. Far away from your old Dutch grandpa who told me once that it was scientifically proven that men are messier than women. Far away from eating our lunches at the top of the silo. Far away from silly assumptions and high school dreams.
I left for college in Iowa and we talked a few times. "Wish you would have gone to school here," I said to you years after that summer. "Me too," you said, and we left it at that.
So here's to the hours of conversations as we walked up and down the rows of barley and spuds, and here's to not being afraid to find a friend in you, and here's to time pushing us along like some bully, never allowing us to say what we wanted to say. And here's to an almost-love.