Favorite Person

Are you anyone's favorite person?

When I was young, I was stopped on the street by someone conducting a social experiment of some sort. His demeanor and dress rather screamed, “grad student.” He asked me if I would mind answering a question. Just one. I like to be helpful when I can, so I said, “sure.”

It was an answer I was to regret keenly for years.

He asked, “Are you anyone’s favorite person?”

I answered honestly. “Frankly, Mister, I’d be surprised if I cracked anyone’s top ten.”

I had a lot of social acquaintances then. But no one that I would have expected to go out of their way for me. I patched a lot of emotional skinned knees and iced a lot of bruised hearts for people, but I wasn’t fool enough to expect them to do the same for me if I needed it.

I’ve always thought of myself as being somewhat difficult to like. Too many old defense mechanisms from my nightmare childhood and bad beats haunting me. I was always “on.” Always.

I had long accepted the fact that many people wouldn’t care for my company, and I wasn’t going to criticize them for their good taste.

But it nagged at me. Among all the people that I knew, and was involved with in various ways, was it possible that I wasn’t important to any of them? That if I left town, or left the Earth entirely, that everyone I knew would shake their heads, say, “what a shame,” and forget my name and face before a week had gone?

It seemed so. I pretended it didn’t matter. I always had time “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” and when it all wore thin, I hid among my books, putting out a cloud of cigar smoke like a panicked squid spouts ink. I resolved to die alone, soon to be forgotten, my name writ in water.

I tried to be at peace with that. I'd been dealt a pretty horrific hand by life, a bad coming up, a crippling injury, no family to turn in misfortune, and built a rather average, “successful,” by most metrics existence. I wrote a lot, and threw it all away. I drank a bit too much, but managed to avoid that ditch by inches.

When Kathleen came along, I had wrestled the hollow shadow into submission. I felt that life is a burden to be borne, but the admirable thing is to bear it well, and alone.

Her kindness, charm, and patient willingness to take me where she found me changed that. For the first time in my life, I was suddenly someone's favorite person. I almost panicked. In all my deep thinking, I'd never considered the possibility, or that someone would be my favorite person, too.

She still is. And I think she always will be. But I had to change. It wasn't easy, taking down barrier after barrier, silencing one painful memory after another. But she was so patient, so kind that I would have felt like a heel for mistrusting her. She was, and is, everything to me – lover, ally, co-conspirator in shenanigans, sounding board, muse and the model of virtues that I lack.

Is this a happy ending? I am always hesitant to say so. “Call no man happy 'til he dies.” Those who think seriously about life know that all love must end in tears, either at a parting, or a graveside. It's the price we pay for the joy and wonder. And it honors all that was good when we pay that price willingly.

But today, as a new phase of my life begins, probably the last, she is here. And whatever it should bring, I won't have to face it alone. I want to live through it all with her beside me, and die holding her hand. Or should the fates be bastards, I want to be the last thing she sees, smiling and grateful for her endless gifts that made me a better person in the deepest parts.

Can we really ask for more?