Tuesday, September 4, 2018

First loves are the hardest to recover from.

My years in High School were a funny place for me in my life. I'm sure they were for a lot of people, and I'm sure I could write dozens upon dozens of blog posts regarding the shenanigans I got into and survived.

One evening during the first week of High School I got up the nerve to talk to a boy on my bus. I had spent my summer dodging confrontation with a boy that a friend of mine had introduced me to and I did NOT want to date because we had the same last name. That same friend had taken me on a wild adventure with a boy she met online (and I've written about previously). This boy on the bus lived one neighborhood away down the street from my grandfather. He was freckle faced with dark reddish brown hair and bright blue eyes. He wore the same green Adidas sweatshirt nearly every day and he lived, breathed and obsessed about soccer. As we left the High School lot, my hands started to sweat and butterflies crept up my chest; he was seated across the aisle from me. I noticed the neon green of his cast from beneath the wrist of his sweatshirt and asked what happened. Apparently during soccer practice he had tumbled into a drainage ditch in an attempt to retrieve a ball and broken his arm. We made some small talk about freshman jitters and how he had an older sibling that was a senior that year. It was typical awkward conversation between two kids that never talked to anyone on the bus. Bumping along as we turned into the neighborhood ahead of mine, I turned to him and asked if I could sign his cast. Surprisingly he said yes and slipped a permanent marker out of the pouch of his hoodie. I scrawled my name in an arch above his thumb... and then added my phone number right above it. It was a private line that my mother had gifted me for my 15th birthday. That's how my next 7 years started.

I spent the majority of those 4 years cuddled up in that green Adidas sweatshirt or with his arm around my waist. We broke up periodically for a few weeks/months at a time, but I was always at his soccer practices and games. At one point, we were teammates on an indoor league that our friends and I had formed one winter. Nights were spent drinking (underage) and playing Grand Theft Auto in a mutual friends basement or around a bonfire in the woods of a different on again off again boyfriend's house. When they all went to College or signed up for the Air Force, I was right on their heels as always.

When the military said they wouldn't have me; he said he would. At the time he was based in Great Falls, Montana. I took off after him. We spent the week I was there researching military housing, picking out rings and partying off base... once again I found myself in his sweatshirt, in the crook of his arm, slightly inebriated and playing video games. He'd run his thumb along the silhouette of my ear and ask his buddies if they'd ever seen such tiny ears before. ((Side note, I do have some of the tiniest ears known to man, almost small enough to question whether they're deformed.)) He'd kiss my neck and pull me in closer... I was that last bit of High School he had... the last memento of home. I was comforting like his sweatshirts were to me. I can still smell him in my memory, tucked into the collar of those sweatshirts zipped up to my nose. I can still see his intensely straight hair tickling his eyelids as he would lay kicked back against my bedroom wall sketching ideas for murals. His freckled nose scrunched up, bottom lip bit between his front teeth, The Cranberries playing in the background.

It was a month or two post visit to Montana that he came home for Christmas leave. We had planned on meeting up with our guys at a chain Italian restaurant for a few drinks and to announce our engagement. The next day I was scheduled to fly out to Chicago for my first month of work as a Flight Attendant. I remember dinner was full of laughter, practical jokes, and glasses of the house red wine being slid across the table to me as my current glass would empty. It wasn't until a friend was driving us back to his parents house that I realized the dinner flew by and we had yet to announce our engagement. Actually, he'd been home for a day and a half and I hadn't yet seen the ring he said he'd picked up the week prior. I laid my head on his chest and breathed him in. Eyes closed in the backseat of our friend's car, Radiohead's Idioteque on loop and vibrating in my bones with each drop of the bass. I looped my fingers through his and my heart became overwhelmed with dread. Tears dropped down my cheeks. I refused to get out of the car when we pulled into the driveway. I looked him in the eye and asked what happened, why was he avoiding the conversation? Why was he refusing to talk about our plans to OUR friends? He asked if we could talk outside the car and I sat up against the door and refused. I was sobering up enough to realize there was a reason he pushed the wine so hard. He helped me out of the car and I could barely walk, seven years of love. Seven years bounced back and forth, I knew where the ball was going before he even kicked it. I could read his body better than the rest of our team. I knew by the way his arm guarded me and walked me into the guest bedroom this was the last time, this was it. He couldn't love me, he said. He couldn't love me in any way other than his best friend or like a family member. I placed his hands on his chest begging this to not be real, that this can't really be happening. I was choking on my sobs. Seven years. Seven years. He went to leave the room and I grabbed at his wrist, please don't do this to us. Please don't let this be how it ends. I grabbed for my keys and he swat them out of my hand. He couldn't keep me there. I wanted to come up out of my skin.

I vaguely remember quite a few of our friends trying to talk to me and console me in an effort to keep me from leaving; I was a good 40 minutes from home even with taking back roads and not even close to being sober. I am not an advocate for driving under the influence and I was very much not in my right mind on that cold December night 15 years ago. I wish someone, an adultier adult maybe, had come to me and walked me inside or taken me home. But that's not the case in this story. I drove home, hysterical, hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably all the way home. I don't even remember unlocking my mom's door and going inside. I remember walking around to her side of the bed and crying for my mama to hold me. I remember hearing her voice on the phone rearranging my flight into Chicago, hearing her talk to the woman who had been referring to me as her daughter in law for a few years and the anger in her voice as they threw their proverbial hands up on how this could have happened.

The ache from that night still lingers. I can still feel it squeeze my heart even now.

He showed up on my doorstep in 2007. My then Husband was at work and I could hear my grandparents greeting him out on the front porch. My blood ran cold. I wasn't prepared to see him and I was trying to feed Logan in his high chair. I saw his feet walking down the sidewalk to my entry on the side of my grandparents house followed by a knock on the door. What greeted me on the other side of the door was the hollowed reflection of a man that had been my best friend and sweetest love for seven years of my life. So much had happened in the five years since that Christmas. We caught up for a few minutes with small talk, and then he apologized. He didn't have to. At that point I thought I was happily married with a beautiful baby boy and soon to be another baby on the way. At that point, I thought my life was THE American Dream. I did not know how to respond other than to forgive him. Maybe he needed to hear he was forgiven to move on. Maybe he had shown up thinking I'd be the same me, which technically I was just with a child and a different, wiser perspective.

That was the very last time I ever saw him.

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