--{ three early loves }------
can i even use the word love for such experiences? probably not, but i will anyway, because it felt like love at the time. now, now it just makes me feel old.
j. it was the beginning of high school. i was a thirteen-year-old freshman, he was a regular-aged senior. like i, he was terribly geeky. unlike i, he could draw. he was tall and lanky and funny, in a nerdy, computer-gamey, dungeons-and-dragonsey, comic-bookey kind of way, and gosh i adored him. he was one of the few people in high school who was nice to me. we wrote letters to each other, after he went to college. gushy stupid young-people letters.
when he came back over christmas break, he'd decided that acting upon anything would probably be a really bad idea, given our age difference and all the ensuing statutory prohibitions that followed. he was probably right, but still. i was mopey for weeks.
i've since heard that he's ended up in wisconsin, of all places, as editor of some magazine called comics and games retailer. i was reminded of him while watching ghost world.
i should email him.
r. i met her at some summer camp for "gifted" students. she was short and perky and had this hoarse voice that i could listen to for hours, which i did, because she was much talkier than me. our birthdays were just two months apart. i thought she was the bestest person in the world.
we wrote to each other daily in high school. really. we had four or five conversations going on at once, whatever the postal service from memphis to knoxville could handle. i loved her for years, even after we went to college in the same city, even after i went to grad school. for awhile, she'd occupied in my mind that space that people naively reserve for soulmates. she was so hip and cool and knew all the things about pop culture that i never knew and dropped big sociopoliticultural theory type words that i never heard as a p-chem girl. she visited me once over christmas and we held hands and i still remember that.
much much later on, i became obsessive, and things got messy for a period of time, then better, and then we diverged. she lived in noe valley, and i lived in an area of sf that she called "dangerous" (though even that area is probably gentrified by now). she became "an attorney earning $100,000 a year" (probably more by now), on the "upwardly mobile track" and "wear[ing] little Ann Taylor suits" (her words, not mine). i make nowhere near 100K, and while, i suppose, the government attorney thing could be construed as upwardly mobile, i still don't own a designer suit and, because my job will allow me to get away with wearing the same suit (that is not really a suit) over and over during my short and disconnected court appearances, probably never will. i think we both realized this divergence, and lost touch.
not sure i want to email her, at least not this year.
d. it was, yet again, that summer camp for "gifted" students, the year after i first met r. it was a total mismatch. he was a baptist, probably fundamentalist though i didn't really pay attention at the time, and i was and still am agnostic. he told me that heaven wouldn't be heaven without me, and i made him read contact.
but he looked like peter scolari and sang beautifully, oh did he sing beautifully. i would play billy joel on the piano just so he could sing along, crooning in that voice that was way too deep for his small frame.
the smell of polo still reminds me of him.
we wrote to each other after the camp ended (you can see how large a role writing has played in my life) but things drifted. although we ended up at the same college, i was dating other people by then. but he still sang beautifully, and i still went to the concerts in which he sang.
he has since come out, and is living with his partner in utah. i would email him, except i can't find an email address. weirdly, even though much of my early days were full of actual physical letters, i don't write them nearly so much anymore.
i group these three instances together because they were the last times that love was young and uncomplicated for me. (sure, the thing with r. eventually got complicated, but that was much so much later.) after those three came the arbitrary game-playingness of a. and the general seaminess of c. (who really shouldn't count in this recounting of loves). d2 was a good intermission, though there was a strange inexplicability at the end, but then there was d3, who was just ughy. and so it goes, j2 and f and e and maybe j3 and maybe even all the letters for whom love didn't even come into play. (indeed, these letters really shouldn't be lumped together, but it is still too soon to divide them all.)
but whatever. love, or what passes as love, goes on and on, but has never been quite so simple as what i felt those first three times, back when i was young.
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