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Dan firmly believes that five perfect minutes live in every New York City snowstorm. Five perfect minutes when the rage of it ends, but nothing's fully stopped yet. Everything is still, quiet, and as he sees it: a blank page. Just after the dark night, just after it's all too frightful and burdensome to throw yourself into. But just before the first of the morning masses yawns awake and sinks a boot into the pristineness of it all, turning it to sludge.
Through the frosted window of the loft, he can see it all letting up, the black sky dimming again, far away some snowplow driver stretching in bed. So, as he always does, Dan pours too-hot coffee into a chipped mug and climbs onto his fire escape to feel everything before it disappears.
Five perfect minutes. Between Dan and Blair, it always seemed to come down to that.
There was the whole incident with Serena stealing the fashion shoot freshman year, when that strange urge to comfort Blair—one that wouldn't fully define itself for years—inexplicably dragged him across a hallway and to the floor with her and possessed him Exorcist-style to spill his mommy issues.
And so there I was, he'd admitted to her. I was sitting across the table from her, looking her straight in the eye, and I didn't say anything.
Why not?
He still remembers how surprised he'd felt about how genuine her question sounded.
Uh, I don't know, but I wish I had. Because even if it didn't change anything, she'd know how I felt.
[Dan does realize the unbelievable significance of this dialogue in hindsight, all of it coming together now like pieces in a puzzle with a dissatisfying end-image. The more things change, the more they do stay the same.]
Then there was Georgina's takedown. The first one, if you're counting. It was the first time he'd seen Blair prize revenge over her personal space, pressed herself against him as she giddily orchestrated the ruse that landed their mutual enemy in Jesus Camp.
[There is a brief interlude here for Dan to consider how fucking ridiculous his life is.]
In those five minutes—there is no eloquent way to put this—Blair turned Dan on for the first time. Quite literally, as if he was a machine deprogramming itself from observing her as pretty in a bitchy, dictatorial, ice queen way to admiring her as pretty in a pretty way.
She'd been wearing a summery red dress and—shocker—a slim headband to match. Her hair was silky but lifted behind the band in a little pouf. She smelled like gardenias and mint and the kind of tea that only rich people prepare at home. So absorbed in their plan, Blair wasn't even noticing how her arm was brushing his or how their heads were pressed together or the startling proximity of her bright red lips.
But Dan had.
Don't worry, virgin, I'll talk you through it, she'd cooed, and he was horrified at the stirring it prompted in his pants.
[He isn't proud to admit that the mere sentence fueled a few fantasies in the weeks following…and to this day.]
There was the afternoon across the coffee counter at the gallery when he advised her to…he curses himself for this…take the risk and tell Chuck she loved him. Their scene in The Age of Innocence…foreplay feigning stage play. Dorota's wedding. The road trip. The W internship. The night they kissed for the first time. The second time.
So many moments, Dan watches them like snowflakes before the accumulation, right there in his reach but impossible to touch without ruining. So many moments he could have said something, done anything to give Blair any indication that, for her heart, he could someday be a contender.
[The Blair stored in his mind manifests briefly to roll her eyes. Really, Humphrey? An On the Waterfront reference, at a time like this?]
In fact, if Dan could take all their perfect five minutes and line them up in a row, cut out the rest of it, he and Blair might have enough material there for a full love story.
But what they had was never the problem. It was the rest of it.
Dan hears it then, the first shovel making a dent in the perfection. He releases a cold breath, and it manifests in the air like cigarette smoke. The rest of it.
He adjusts to stand, embrace it grumpily and groggily inside and away from the waking city. That is, until his foot slips on the metal grating of the fire escape.
The world tilts, spins, and then everything goes white.
As it does, the memory of Blair on that hallway floor finds him again. It knows his address so well.
"And so there I was," he recites, "I was sitting across the table from her, looking her straight in the eye, and I didn't say anything."
"Why not?"
For a moment, Dan is taken aback by how genuine the question sounds. He hadn't realized that Blair's voice could even hit that octave of authenticity.
"Uh, I don't know, he says, "but I wish I had. Because even if it didn't change anything, she'd know how I felt."
Blair stares off into space for a moment, sitting with his words. Or maybe just mentally rehearsing her next insult.
"Um, what's up? Do I have something on my face, or…?"
She ignores him. "Humphrey, I was just struck by one all-consuming, paralyzing thought."
"Why do we all refer to each other by our last names when that's not a normal thing people do…?"
"No," Blair narrows her eyes and purses her lips like she's about to order a strange dish off a menu, "perhaps you're not…completely awful."
"Wow," Dan says with a laugh, resting his head against the wall behind him, "from you? I'll take that as a compliment. When should I expect an invite to our next hang? I'm thinking you cross the bridge, we'll grab a slice—"
"Okay," Blair cuts him off with a perfunctory huff, "that's the last time I do charity work."
Dan pauses.
"Seriously, Blair, if you ever need someone to—"
"I don't," she snaps, then softens ever so slightly, "need anyone. I try not to make a habit of doing so."
He looks at her for a moment and, cliché aside, feels like it's for the first time.
If someone had asked Dan to sketch Blair from memory say a week ago, he might've described an American Girl Doll possessed by the spirit of Machiavelli. And look, that's not completely wrong.
But out of her predatory stance, her features slant in a nice way, still dollish but blazing. Fiercely delicate. She wears her contradictions like accessories. Regarding and telling all with one glance, playing both the offense and defense in a game she's invented herself.
Her hair is also really…it's pretty. She has nice hair. Just an observation.
Blair snaps her fingers at him, and he realizes he's been staring dumbly for a solid 45 seconds.
In a race to his tongue, the lame remark that reaches the finish is "so you don't want to be best friends now. Noted."
Blair rolls her eyes.
"And here I thought," Dan pushes off the floor to stand and puts a rasp in his voice, "I coulda been a contender."
Blair blinks at him.
"Um, it's a quote from—"
"On the Waterfront," she finishes, and the 'you idiot' is silent. "I know. I've just never heard an accent so terrible."
"You've seen On the Waterfront?"
Blair pats down her dress and moves to get up as well. Dan reaches a hand out to help her, and she makes a big show of cringing at his fingers as she does it herself.
"Oh, let me guess, you think your unsavory flannel shirt collection and ghostly complexion makes you some expert on classic film. And what? Because I dress nicely and spend more than an afterthought on my hair, I must only have the brain capacity for a sixty-minute soap on the CW?"
The verbal lashing comes so quickly, Dan actually checks to see if he's bleeding.
"That's not what I meant."
"Save it, Humphrey," Blair sighs as they idly walk down the hallway, not quite next to each other. As always, she's a step ahead. "You know, for someone who finds the Upper East Side so pretentious, you certainly pass a lot of judgement. Maybe you do fit right in."
"Now that one hurt."
Blair laughs a little, and Dan is startled by the sound. Maybe it's because she's not laughing at him for once. It almost sounds like a foreign language.
It almost sounds really nice.
The memory doesn't fizzle, it cuts sharply to black.
But when Dan blinks back to consciousness, nothing on him is bloodied or broken. In fact, he's not moved more than an inch from his original perch. The caffeinated content of the mug is still and still steaming. He breathes out sharply, the banging beat in his chest sole evidence that anything just happened at all. Spooked, he swings a leg back over the sill, clutching the wall for dear life to reenter the loft.
Immediately, something feels different. The air is charged with a familiar yet distant energy. He looks around, confused, and quickly ducks behind the bookcase stacked with records as soon as he hears the symphony of voices. Which he would be totally normal about, you know, if he hadn't been home alone.
He quickly realizes it's his father's voice, lecturing—slightly annoying, warm, and comforting as ever. Then Jenny's—chirpier and untouched by exile or angst. He peeks at the stack of crisp white invitations in her hands, remembers the blue of her eyes sans the signature black-lined rims. Eau de waffle wafts through the air.
With a jolt, Dan realizes: it's the first day of school.
The first day of his junior year.
The first day of his junior year of fucking high school.
Carefully, he peers further around the bookcase and nearly chokes, warm coffee splashing over his hand. He sets it down on the nearby shelf to truly brace himself for what he's looking at now. There he is—younger Dan. Buzzcut (ah, so that was what the top of his head looked like, he'd almost forgotten). Hopeful and leashed by his crush on Serena but more so by the light of the Upper East Side reflected in her skewed halo.
Panic rising in his chest, Dan stumbles back into his room, his breaths growing shallow and rapid. Each inhale feels like the sharp knife of an untold story. The moments that defined him, choices that changed him, all crashing over him with brutal clarity. Worse, the choices he didn't make that changed him after all.
He's a man possessed. Something deep inside him feels like he's already running out of time. Whatever this is, whatever's happening to him right now—bizarro dream or not—he just knows he's got five minutes at most. Five minutes.
So he does what he does best. He drags his feet over to his cluttered teenaged desk, hunches over it, picks up a pen.
He starts to write.
Once he finishes and stands there, admiring his work, he immediately knows that he's done something enormous. A sense of mourning fills him. All those perfect five minutes with Blair begin to fade and flicker before fleeing him completely. His memory reaches for what he said to her in that hallway during the shoot one last time.
[Was it a hallway? Why was he at a fashion shoot?]
The image of that silly little headband on her while she's grinning wickedly at him falls away like shattered glass. Princes, church keys, heated conversations with Chuck Bass—gone. He reaches for a stapler only to find that it isn't there.
Whatever he's just done has erased his entire story with Blair, as partial and imperfect as it was. It had been theirs. And now it's all gone.
But as quickly as the mourning came, warmth arrives too. New memories. Dan equates the feeling of it to the first time he got high with Vanessa and then the first time he got really high with Nate. To an onlooker, he's standing there, smiling dumbly. Inside, something erupts…or maybe blooms. Blair and her love language, verbal sparring, sharp yet laced with affection. Blair's soft moans at the Film Forum between their hushed critiques. Blair skating around him at Wollman Rink as he balances sheepishly at its center, snowflakes catching in her gorgeous curls before she kisses his cheek. Blair, uniformed and making snarky remarks on his essay as she sits on his lap, vandalizing it in red ink.
Blair in white, through a veil, reciting something that sounds beautiful, giving him the sort of smile that promises something. Of all her smiles, he's never seen that one before.
"Holy shi—" Dan begins to say, but it doesn't matter because then he is gone, returned to a future that hasn't happened yet, a brave new world, a corrected tale that begins now, as his 16-year-old self enters his room to collect his history textbook, only to find a piece of composition paper sitting atop it instead.
Dan, you don't know this yet, and I can't explain why I do, it starts. But loving Blair Waldorf is going to be your magnum opus.
Please don't wait.