Day Three, February 12: When you've loved. Write either a brief history of your love life, or a single story about the love of your lifetime.
My first love was a boy I met at summer camp. His reputation actually proceeded him... he was dating one of my friends at the time. We were 13 and 14 years old at the time. The next summer, after they'd long since broken up, I tried to talk to him several times, and every time he sort-of ignored me.
He was the hilarious, giant personality with the blue/green/orange/black/it was ten colors that summer hair. He befriended my sister, and somewhere in the midst of a series of long phone calls after the summer ended, they decided we should date.
So, Shelly handed me the telephone one night and demanded that I talk to malvis while she took a shower, because he wasn't allowed to get phone calls after ten and they weren't finished talking yet. I did not see through this plan, because I was a very oblivious fifteen year old girl at the time.
He asked me out. I said no. They repeated the process the next night. And the night after that. Eventually, I said yes. And from there, we spent the next year talking on the phone all night, until one of would hear our parents coming up or down the stairs to admonish us for being on the telephone at four in the morning.
On the weekends, we would meet at the mall or his house (he was very much allergic to the pet hair at my house and his parents were less willing to cart him 25 miles away for a "date") and look for ways to make out for three or four hours.
We were everything that teen love should be, sweet, almost innocent, completely self-absorbed, jealous, full of dramatic twists and turns, and so much fun. I'd never talked like that in my life. I'd never laughed so hard or had so much fun.
We started combusting for real, and not just for fun when one of us was orchestrating drama, somewhere before my second year of college, but it took us another couple of years to really, finally, officially break-up. The last one was one of the easiest endings in history...
"How do you think of me in terms of you?" "What?" "I am your ______. Like, you're talking to someone and you say 'my ________, mary...' I am your??" "Well, how do you think of me in terms of you?" And at the same time, we both said "friend".
The next one was trickier, because I didn't want to admit to anyone ever that I was in any way involved with him. He was safe, easy, loved me more than life. And so I tried to strike some sort of a balance between him and the rest of my life.
This involved things like a seven month stint of lying to my mother about dating him. She'd really laid down the law about the whole thing, since I did have another boyfriend and I was horrible to him. So horrible, in fact, that our parents were trying to intervene. (There was more to it than that, but whatever)
"Stop breaking that poor boy's heart. I don't want you to see him anymore."
For seven months, when I'd come home for the weekend, he'd pick me up at the end of the street or on the next one over, and I'd lie to everyone about where I'd been. It was perfect for what I was doing... I don't think my mother realized how making it so we had to lie about seeing each other gave me better chances to blow him off coldly.
Eventually, Mom found out because my friend's little sister told my sister that I had been at her house getting ready to go to a fraternity date night with him.
The last year or so of that one was Serious. I was still pretty horrible to him, with the cheating and the lying and the blowing him off all the time, and he put a stop to it by dumping me as soon as something that seemed better came along.
(he is now married to a girl that I understand is considerably nicer to him than I ever was)
After that was Waste. Another Camp Person. Say what you will about him, and I know there are loads of bad things to be said on the topic, you can find them in the late 2001/early 2002 archives if you need help, but Waste and I were great at the beginning.
We'd had an adversarial relationship for a couple of years, and then we found ourselves with no one else to hang out with at a weekend camp. So, we talked. And talked. And talked some more. I'd just broken up with the last boy the week before, and I was still pretty devastated.
After a suitable mourning period (which I spent helping him to understand why his current girlfriend was simply not right for him), I cornered him, got him to admit that he liked me and we started dating.
And I'll tell you, after that, we were inseperable and we got along like no two people should, much to the detriment of everything else we had going on in our lives. I guess you could say that we imploded. Or that neither of us was really mature enough to handle the kind of relationship that we had. Or you could say that he had a drug problem and wouldn't get off his lazy ass and get a job. Whatever.
(Last I heard, Waste was employed, self-supporting, and engaged. Go Waste!)
There have been others in the three years since Waste. If you've been reading this for awhile, you've heard about all of them. The short but significant thing with Paul that I held on to much longer than he did. The guy from last winter and spring who I was Not Dating...
And now there's Steady. I really hope that we're just getting started. It's easy and comfortable and fun and I'm really, really happy to be with him.
