I couldn’t tell you when my love for the cuffed jean started, but I can tell you the person who made my love official.
Back in college in Eugene, Ore., my friends and I would go out dancing a few nights a week to a bar/music venue called the Indigo District. I’m pretty sure this place is now patroned by overzealous frat boys, but back then it was the place to be: overtaken by beautiful, fashionable, hip college kids who listened to RATATAT, wore black and drank whiskey shots like water.
There was this guy I always saw there. He was tall, had curly crazy black locks and without fail was always wearing a white Hanes tee with vintage worn-in, perfectly fitted jeans and black dress shoes. And always, always that boy donned rolled cuffs like it was his job.
He was lovely, intriguing and likely given his belligerently fierce dancing, a raging alcoholic. But still, I loved that boy from afar for years.
It was never a sexual thing. It was pure adoration. It was somehow comforting to know that a boy like this existed, and made the world feel right at a time when in fact we were at war and everything was going very, very wrong.
After graduation, I moved to Portland, got a job and didn’t give Indigo boy another thought. That is, until a year or so later when a mediocre Thai food place opened up a few blocks from my apartment. Out of curiosity, one day I peered through the window to see what was inside and poof, like a vision, there he was. Sweaty, wiping his brow over the hot stove in the back: it was Indigo boy. And although he had gone from a fierce, fashionable dancer to a 6-on-a-scale-of-10 Thai food cook extraordinaire, that boy still made my heart jump every time I saw him. During the months that followed, I’d routinely peer through the windows slyly as I passed just to make sure that he was still there. Alive. That he still existed. That he still was wearing his white Hanes shirt, and his hair was still big and black, and his jeans were still rolled.
And then one day, just as fast as he showed up on my street, he disappeared.
I wonder sometimes where he is now.
I wonder if he knows how lovely and special he is.
I wonder what his name is.