Meme of Great Details, Day 2: First Love
Today I will tell the story about Sue. The “in great detail” will not be a problem because I remember very much about this. I will define this as “my first love”, because I had crushes before her, but they weren’t deep or serious after all. (I could also say that Amelia was my first love, but I feel that the question is about something more traditional; as you know, the story of Amelia is more complex…) The thing about Sue is that she broke my heart in a way that had never happened before and, quite frankly, never again; not in that way.
I met her on the internet the spring of 2001; I was 20 years old, nearly 21, and I “celebrated” one year of fully knowing and accepting my sexual orientation. Back then, I wasn’t online as much as now, but there was this site called Sylvia, a lesbian community. I had been on there for maybe a little more than six months, and at that time it was extremely important for me as it was the only way to communicate with other queer people; to broaden my horizons and understand things and in short, talk to people. It was the usual thing; profile page, guestbook, photos, forums and chat rooms and photos and a journal. (It still exists, I’ve recently started using it again; the layout has changed a bit, the forums are weird and I don’t understand how they work, and the activity is low…)
I made quite a few friends there; some of them only for a short while, others for years (I even shared my apartment with one of them, the semester when K. studied in Finland; that was a good time). I met Gill there, the woman who became sort of my mentor… we talked so much about everything and she was important to me; she passed away in January 2006, almost the same time as my dad, and I still miss her oh so much. But this is not about her.
I remember the first time I met Sue online; it was a night in April. I read her profile page and there was something about her way with words that made me want to get to know her, so I wrote in her guest book. She then read my profile, and apparently she liked what she read because we started exchanging messages. (Now that I think about it, Sylvia didn’t have journals then, only endless profile pages, so some people updated their profiles very frequently.) I can’t remember what we talked about exactly in the beginning, but I lked her, and she seemed to like me. That was very exciting, because I felt that there was some kind of connection between us, and very quickly, we wrote to each other every day. I logged in with the hope of having a new message from her, and we wrote things like “guess what my first thought was when I woke up?” and “It’s in the middle of the night and I can’t sleep; I logged in hoping to see you here, but I guess you’re sleeping. I’m reading the words on your profile and I feel calm; you are close to me…”
You get the picture. I felt that I could talk to her about everything, and she said that she felt the same. She was quite a bit introspective, serious and romantic - but she also had a more active side; she did lots of things, had many friends. She wanted to become a writer (she wrote beautifully; she was Polish and had only lived four years in Sweden, and yet her writing was almost perfect!) and she liked being out in the nature, she liked dancing and organizing excursions with her friends, and she said she was too busy. She was almost 19 years old but still in school (when she came to Sweden, she was placed one grade below her age), and her best friend Elin (who was 17, going on 18) was her classmate and had been her girlfriend. Sue was the one to end the relationship because Elin was, she said, too jealous and controlling. Her other best friend was their classmate Fredrik, and he was bisexual. Elin, Sue told me, was a little jealous because Sue had talked a lot about me.
This made the wheels in my brain spin faster. Was it safe to think that Sue really liked me? She said that I was important to her, because her other friends did not understand the deeper side of her personality, the sad and serious side. I made her calm by understanding her, she said; I gave her comfort and hope. In return, she could make me laugh and dance and talk a lot, she promised; she could make me enjoy life more. And, indeed, this was what happened.
I’ve always felt almost painfully sad in April/May; there is something about the beauty of spring that is very hard to take sometimes. But that year, as I watched the burning evening sky with its shades of blue and gold and violet, I loved everything that I saw and felt around me, because, yes, I was in love.
I knew, of course, that it’s not a good idea to jump into anything too quickly; after all, we had never met in real life, and could such an amazing girl really like someone like me; like me in that way?! I had never dared to believe this before, that someone could actually have feelings for me, but Sue wrote to me with so warm, tender words (but not too big words after all) so I couldn’t help it. I had hope, and it was wonderful.
After about a month or six weeks, we started talking about meeting, or at least talking on the phone. I hesitated because I’ve never been a phone person, but Sue said that she really, really wanted to hear my voice. She gave me her number, because she wanted me to make the first call; she wanted me to see that it was nothing to be nervous about… And of course I wanted to, so I called her one day. I don’t remember the details of our first talk (or any other) but it felt good anyway. I remember writing to Amelia about this; I was worried that she would think it’s a bit strange to meet someone on the internet, but she said that no, it’s perfectly fine - as long as we meet for real soon! (I told Ingrid and Marielle too, and they were happy for me… And of course Gill knew all of this; I told her everything about everything…) In the end of May, Sue asked me to come to see her on her birthday in early June.
I was very nervous (I was afraid that she wouldn’t like me and that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about), but she talked me into it (I want to go with you to the lake near my home; I go there often in the evenings because it’s so beautiful; I want to sit with you in the silence and hear your unspoken words” - something like that!), and the truth is, I never really hesitated. Which can only be explained by the fact that I had fallen for her… I had met other girls on the internet, girls who lived much closer to me, but I never met any of them - and now I was getting ready for a seven hours train ride! (I think I had to change trains three times).
Sue met me at the station; she was a little late and I saw her in full speed on her old bike; she was much smaller than I had imagined. She gave me a big hug. Her hair was newly cut; she had wanted to look like Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted and her mother didn’t like it. I liked it; she was very pretty. Luckily for me, she met two friends on the station who wanted to talk to her; I had a few moments to observe her. She asked me if I wanted to take the bus or walk; it wasn’t very far, and that way we could talk alone before we came home to her mother.
We walked. She talked about the city and about the houses we saw; she handled the situation very well and little by little I began to relax. I liked walking there with her. Then she said that she was very happy that I was there, because she wanted to tell me something that she couldn’t talk openly about with her friends or her mother.
Sue told me that she was in love. With a girl called Rebecka who had been visiting; they had met through Sylvia, they were just friends, but then they fell in love as soon as they met, and Rebecka had left the same morning.
I’m sure that at least a part of sky fell down on me. I didn’t understand. I realized that although I had tried to tell myself not to get my hopes up too high, I had had hope, and now within minutes, it was gone. It seemed so absurd - if I had been the first one to arrive and this girl a couple of days later, would Sue have wanted me then? Who was this Rebecka person anyway? What wonderful qualities did she have that meant more than all the wonderful qualities that I had, according to Sue’s own words? I realized that I had read too much between the lines, and I had never felt so stupid.
But somehow I managed to act normal; I even congratulated her. We just kept on talking. I guess maybe the shock actually helped me not to give away my feelings, and Sue was probably too happy to notice anything weird about me. She was just glad to have me there because she felt that she could talk to me; her mother didn’t know yet (because she didn’t really “approve” of the fact that her daughter liked girls) and Elin didn’t want to hear a word about it, and Fredrik didn’t want to know too much either because he knew how Elin felt…
Her mother greeted me with kindness. She was a bit old in my eyes (in her early sixties); Sue was the youngest of her children. The rest of the family lived in Poland; Sue had four older siblings; the one closest to her in age was her 26 year old sister (and the only one of them she was out to). Her 40 year old brother had a son almost her age. The father died when Sue was twelve; he fell down from a ladder when he was fixing the roof, and Sue saw him fall.
Later, Sue told me that her mother liked me immediately, and liked me more than Rebecka, because “she couldn’t eat anything” - she was vegan, and I was only partly vegetarian; I still ate both chicken and fish then. I was childish enough to be pleased by the fact that the mother liked me better than “the vegan dyke from hell” - now I’m not the one to be mean or call people names, but for a long time, I referred to Rebecka as that, in my mind…
And what happened next? I don’t really remember, but soon enough, some friends came over because we were all going to that lake to barbecue and celebrate Sue’s b-day. So I met the ex girlfriend… She was tall, willowy, and quite beautiful. She had blonde half long hair, but aside from her hair, she looked just like she could have been painted by Waterhouse or Burne-Jones (I was into the Pre-Raphaelites then!); maybe it was the shape of her chin and her nose, and her big, deep, sad eyes… I don’t know how I would have looked upon her if I had had a chance with Sue, but now I felt almost like I had something in common with Elin (except that I felt that she was more entitled to being sad) because we both had unrequited feelings for Sue… Elin, of course, did not feel that way about me; she was rather cold toward me…
The lake was not within walking distance so I had to sit on somebody’s luggage carrier; it was very, very uncomfortable, but we arrived to the lake, and we were maybe ten or twelve people. I can’t say I had fun; you know me, in a crowd of strangers… They were all between fifteen and nineteen years old and I felt like an alien or something… There was a bit of tension in the air because everyone knew about Sue and Elin, and at one point Sue mentioned her new girlfriend. Elin walked away, and the others told Sue that she shouldn’t talk about it, but Sue said that she had the right to talk about it… Well, I felt uncomfortable. But they talked Elin into coming back, and after a while we went home. But after I had fallen off a bike, I refused to sit on a luggage carrier so Sue and Elin walked with me. I guess both Elin and I were mutually annoyed by each other’s presence…
Then, a few of us watched something on TV. Some of them went home after that, but Elin and Fredrik stayed and we watched a movie, Angela’s Ashes. Then it was late at night, but we went for a walk. It was dark. If I remember correctly, I felt that I liked all of them at that moment. With not so many people around, Sue paid more attention to me…
When we came back in, I realized that Elin was going to spend the night there - in Sue’s room, when I slept at a mattress in the living room. But by then it was nearly 3 am and I had been awake for about 23 hours so I fell asleep… I woke up early and got up, because I misread my watch. “No, no, no, child, go back to sleep!” the mother said, because it was only 7.30… The next time I woke up, the mother had gone to work. I had breakfast with Sue and Elin on the balcony, it was Sue’s b-day and I gave her my gift, a book I liked. It was around noon, and then, finally, Elin’s dad came to pick her up.
Sue and I sat in a park for a while, talking and playing cards. We were in her room and she showed me photos and talked about her childhood. Those hours were not so bad. I really liked her. She also told me that Rebecka wasn’t really her type and that’s why it was so surprising that they were together; “I usually fall for quiet, shy girls like you or Elin”, she said. Yay, thanks for the info…
She also played the piano. This I remember very clearly. She did not play with the extraordinary perfection of someone I got to know later… because she was self-taught, but it was magical anyway. I think she played “Für Elise” and “Ballade pour Adeline”… The windows in the living room were partly clouded by birch trees, and the sun that fell in through the leaves made dancing patterns on the floor; I watched the shadows dance. And I watched Sue. She was beautiful; a little dark fairy with a gorgeous smile. Her black hair was natural; her eyes were brown and her skin was tanned. She didn’t have any styling products in her hair that day, so it was very soft. It fell softly down on the golden curve of her neck, and I wanted desperately to touch her. It was painful because I knew that I couldn’t because she belonged to someone else - the one who saw her first - and she didn’t even know how I felt. I didn’t tell her.
Her mother came home in the afternoon, and she started to make dinner and a birthday cake. Sue went into town, on her bike, because she needed to buy a shirt, and it would go much quicker if she took her bike, so I stayed. While we waited, one of the mother’s friends from church showed up (they were Catholics; Sue wasn’t practising). This was an old little lady (like 80 or so) who was very nice and sweet. She had been a Swedish and Latin teacher. I enjoyed talking to her, and the mother was very nice too. I often get along very well with people’s parents…
After the dinner, Sue got a phone call from one of her friends. This was a boy who had recently lost his father (who committed suicide!) and he needed someone to talk to. She explained to me that she had to go to him. And she did.
She was gone a long time, and while I waited for her, I wrote a letter. “Dearest Amelia, may I come to you and cry?”… I remember that I started the letter that way and I told her about everything that had happened (this was one of the letters she replied quickly to, thankfully). It was already late when Sue came back. We took a walk in the dark again, and then we went to bed. I was going home the next day, at noon. But Sue was leaving a couple of hours earlier, going to Rebecka. So, she hugged me and said goodnight, and I think that I didn’t fall asleep so easily that night on my mattress in the living room.
The next morning, she hugged me and said goodbye so quickly that I hardly had time to notice. This was one of the more painful moments of the weekend; she disappeared from me too quickly and I felt that I was never going to see her again. I had wanted to love her, I had been ready to love her, but she didn’t even see it, and she was gone.
So I spent a few hours with her mother. She was a Maths teacher, and her Swedish was far from the perfection of that of her daughter, but we could communicate. I corrected a letter about something for someone… When she walked me to the bus that was going to take me to the train, she invited me to come with them (and Elin and Fredrik) to Poland that summer. She talked about her grandchild, Sue’s nephew; “He is a very, very nice boy, I’d like you to meet him, he would like you so much…”
Absurd, don’t you think?! I couldn’t tell the poor woman that I didn’t care about her grandson because I was in love with her daughter…
I wrote a letter to Sue while I waited for the train. I didn’t tell her about all my feelings, I don’t really remember what I wrote but probably something sentimental and sweet… and I guess I finished the letter to Amelia.
Then, on the train, I cried.
When I came back home (this was the summer before I moved to Uppsala, aka The City of Ghosts) I didn’t know what to say. I had told my parents that I was going to see “a friend” so they wouldn’t be prepared to see me heartbroken. (I don’t remember if this was before or after I came out to my mum) Luckily for me, I guess, I had already arranged to go with my Grandmother that same day (or maybe it was the next day) and spend a few days with her. In the car with her, I told her everything, and she felt sorry for me. “Poor you; tell me all about it and have a good cry, then when we get home, you’ll have a big glass of wine and then you’ll sleep…” She also told me that “this is only the first time; you’re going to go through many things like this in your life, and sometimes, you’re going to be the one to make someone cry…”
I believed, of course, that I was never, ever going to get over Sue. I was never ever going to be happy again. One thing I did later, and I’m glad I did, is that I wrote one more letter to Sue where I actually told her a little about how I felt. So we talked about it. Her point of view was that she had not meant to make me fall in love with her because her being so open and passionate is just her way of being friendly, and she didn’t mean for me to read too much into all her words… of course.
We stayed in touch for a while, but not very much because it was hard for me. She broke up with “the vegan dyke from hell” who had “stolen” her from me (I don’t know why and how), fell in love with and was left by someone else… I think it was five years since the last time I heard from her; she told me that she was happy. She had been diagnosed bipolar, but she was getting help. She also lived with an older woman (meaning about ten years older than her) who had a child.
And I got over her. If falling in love with someone else is a good sign, then it took like four months… which is nothing, compared to you know what. But as you can see, I still remember this, because it turned out to be a big and important experience.
It was almost ten years ago. And it was all an illusion, a sweet dream. But for a couple of weeks, I was happy, I had hope, and I even dared to jump on a train to meet her. That was really a huge step for me, especially at that age. Afterwards, I was glad that I did it because it proved to me that I can do things if I’m motivated enough, if they seem important enough. So, once, ten years ago, I did something important.
Next topic: My parents, in great detail. (But I promise, it will be less detailed than this…)
I met her on the internet the spring of 2001; I was 20 years old, nearly 21, and I “celebrated” one year of fully knowing and accepting my sexual orientation. Back then, I wasn’t online as much as now, but there was this site called Sylvia, a lesbian community. I had been on there for maybe a little more than six months, and at that time it was extremely important for me as it was the only way to communicate with other queer people; to broaden my horizons and understand things and in short, talk to people. It was the usual thing; profile page, guestbook, photos, forums and chat rooms and photos and a journal. (It still exists, I’ve recently started using it again; the layout has changed a bit, the forums are weird and I don’t understand how they work, and the activity is low…)
I made quite a few friends there; some of them only for a short while, others for years (I even shared my apartment with one of them, the semester when K. studied in Finland; that was a good time). I met Gill there, the woman who became sort of my mentor… we talked so much about everything and she was important to me; she passed away in January 2006, almost the same time as my dad, and I still miss her oh so much. But this is not about her.
I remember the first time I met Sue online; it was a night in April. I read her profile page and there was something about her way with words that made me want to get to know her, so I wrote in her guest book. She then read my profile, and apparently she liked what she read because we started exchanging messages. (Now that I think about it, Sylvia didn’t have journals then, only endless profile pages, so some people updated their profiles very frequently.) I can’t remember what we talked about exactly in the beginning, but I lked her, and she seemed to like me. That was very exciting, because I felt that there was some kind of connection between us, and very quickly, we wrote to each other every day. I logged in with the hope of having a new message from her, and we wrote things like “guess what my first thought was when I woke up?” and “It’s in the middle of the night and I can’t sleep; I logged in hoping to see you here, but I guess you’re sleeping. I’m reading the words on your profile and I feel calm; you are close to me…”
You get the picture. I felt that I could talk to her about everything, and she said that she felt the same. She was quite a bit introspective, serious and romantic - but she also had a more active side; she did lots of things, had many friends. She wanted to become a writer (she wrote beautifully; she was Polish and had only lived four years in Sweden, and yet her writing was almost perfect!) and she liked being out in the nature, she liked dancing and organizing excursions with her friends, and she said she was too busy. She was almost 19 years old but still in school (when she came to Sweden, she was placed one grade below her age), and her best friend Elin (who was 17, going on 18) was her classmate and had been her girlfriend. Sue was the one to end the relationship because Elin was, she said, too jealous and controlling. Her other best friend was their classmate Fredrik, and he was bisexual. Elin, Sue told me, was a little jealous because Sue had talked a lot about me.
This made the wheels in my brain spin faster. Was it safe to think that Sue really liked me? She said that I was important to her, because her other friends did not understand the deeper side of her personality, the sad and serious side. I made her calm by understanding her, she said; I gave her comfort and hope. In return, she could make me laugh and dance and talk a lot, she promised; she could make me enjoy life more. And, indeed, this was what happened.
I’ve always felt almost painfully sad in April/May; there is something about the beauty of spring that is very hard to take sometimes. But that year, as I watched the burning evening sky with its shades of blue and gold and violet, I loved everything that I saw and felt around me, because, yes, I was in love.
I knew, of course, that it’s not a good idea to jump into anything too quickly; after all, we had never met in real life, and could such an amazing girl really like someone like me; like me in that way?! I had never dared to believe this before, that someone could actually have feelings for me, but Sue wrote to me with so warm, tender words (but not too big words after all) so I couldn’t help it. I had hope, and it was wonderful.
After about a month or six weeks, we started talking about meeting, or at least talking on the phone. I hesitated because I’ve never been a phone person, but Sue said that she really, really wanted to hear my voice. She gave me her number, because she wanted me to make the first call; she wanted me to see that it was nothing to be nervous about… And of course I wanted to, so I called her one day. I don’t remember the details of our first talk (or any other) but it felt good anyway. I remember writing to Amelia about this; I was worried that she would think it’s a bit strange to meet someone on the internet, but she said that no, it’s perfectly fine - as long as we meet for real soon! (I told Ingrid and Marielle too, and they were happy for me… And of course Gill knew all of this; I told her everything about everything…) In the end of May, Sue asked me to come to see her on her birthday in early June.
I was very nervous (I was afraid that she wouldn’t like me and that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about), but she talked me into it (I want to go with you to the lake near my home; I go there often in the evenings because it’s so beautiful; I want to sit with you in the silence and hear your unspoken words” - something like that!), and the truth is, I never really hesitated. Which can only be explained by the fact that I had fallen for her… I had met other girls on the internet, girls who lived much closer to me, but I never met any of them - and now I was getting ready for a seven hours train ride! (I think I had to change trains three times).
Sue met me at the station; she was a little late and I saw her in full speed on her old bike; she was much smaller than I had imagined. She gave me a big hug. Her hair was newly cut; she had wanted to look like Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted and her mother didn’t like it. I liked it; she was very pretty. Luckily for me, she met two friends on the station who wanted to talk to her; I had a few moments to observe her. She asked me if I wanted to take the bus or walk; it wasn’t very far, and that way we could talk alone before we came home to her mother.
We walked. She talked about the city and about the houses we saw; she handled the situation very well and little by little I began to relax. I liked walking there with her. Then she said that she was very happy that I was there, because she wanted to tell me something that she couldn’t talk openly about with her friends or her mother.
Sue told me that she was in love. With a girl called Rebecka who had been visiting; they had met through Sylvia, they were just friends, but then they fell in love as soon as they met, and Rebecka had left the same morning.
I’m sure that at least a part of sky fell down on me. I didn’t understand. I realized that although I had tried to tell myself not to get my hopes up too high, I had had hope, and now within minutes, it was gone. It seemed so absurd - if I had been the first one to arrive and this girl a couple of days later, would Sue have wanted me then? Who was this Rebecka person anyway? What wonderful qualities did she have that meant more than all the wonderful qualities that I had, according to Sue’s own words? I realized that I had read too much between the lines, and I had never felt so stupid.
But somehow I managed to act normal; I even congratulated her. We just kept on talking. I guess maybe the shock actually helped me not to give away my feelings, and Sue was probably too happy to notice anything weird about me. She was just glad to have me there because she felt that she could talk to me; her mother didn’t know yet (because she didn’t really “approve” of the fact that her daughter liked girls) and Elin didn’t want to hear a word about it, and Fredrik didn’t want to know too much either because he knew how Elin felt…
Her mother greeted me with kindness. She was a bit old in my eyes (in her early sixties); Sue was the youngest of her children. The rest of the family lived in Poland; Sue had four older siblings; the one closest to her in age was her 26 year old sister (and the only one of them she was out to). Her 40 year old brother had a son almost her age. The father died when Sue was twelve; he fell down from a ladder when he was fixing the roof, and Sue saw him fall.
Later, Sue told me that her mother liked me immediately, and liked me more than Rebecka, because “she couldn’t eat anything” - she was vegan, and I was only partly vegetarian; I still ate both chicken and fish then. I was childish enough to be pleased by the fact that the mother liked me better than “the vegan dyke from hell” - now I’m not the one to be mean or call people names, but for a long time, I referred to Rebecka as that, in my mind…
And what happened next? I don’t really remember, but soon enough, some friends came over because we were all going to that lake to barbecue and celebrate Sue’s b-day. So I met the ex girlfriend… She was tall, willowy, and quite beautiful. She had blonde half long hair, but aside from her hair, she looked just like she could have been painted by Waterhouse or Burne-Jones (I was into the Pre-Raphaelites then!); maybe it was the shape of her chin and her nose, and her big, deep, sad eyes… I don’t know how I would have looked upon her if I had had a chance with Sue, but now I felt almost like I had something in common with Elin (except that I felt that she was more entitled to being sad) because we both had unrequited feelings for Sue… Elin, of course, did not feel that way about me; she was rather cold toward me…
The lake was not within walking distance so I had to sit on somebody’s luggage carrier; it was very, very uncomfortable, but we arrived to the lake, and we were maybe ten or twelve people. I can’t say I had fun; you know me, in a crowd of strangers… They were all between fifteen and nineteen years old and I felt like an alien or something… There was a bit of tension in the air because everyone knew about Sue and Elin, and at one point Sue mentioned her new girlfriend. Elin walked away, and the others told Sue that she shouldn’t talk about it, but Sue said that she had the right to talk about it… Well, I felt uncomfortable. But they talked Elin into coming back, and after a while we went home. But after I had fallen off a bike, I refused to sit on a luggage carrier so Sue and Elin walked with me. I guess both Elin and I were mutually annoyed by each other’s presence…
Then, a few of us watched something on TV. Some of them went home after that, but Elin and Fredrik stayed and we watched a movie, Angela’s Ashes. Then it was late at night, but we went for a walk. It was dark. If I remember correctly, I felt that I liked all of them at that moment. With not so many people around, Sue paid more attention to me…
When we came back in, I realized that Elin was going to spend the night there - in Sue’s room, when I slept at a mattress in the living room. But by then it was nearly 3 am and I had been awake for about 23 hours so I fell asleep… I woke up early and got up, because I misread my watch. “No, no, no, child, go back to sleep!” the mother said, because it was only 7.30… The next time I woke up, the mother had gone to work. I had breakfast with Sue and Elin on the balcony, it was Sue’s b-day and I gave her my gift, a book I liked. It was around noon, and then, finally, Elin’s dad came to pick her up.
Sue and I sat in a park for a while, talking and playing cards. We were in her room and she showed me photos and talked about her childhood. Those hours were not so bad. I really liked her. She also told me that Rebecka wasn’t really her type and that’s why it was so surprising that they were together; “I usually fall for quiet, shy girls like you or Elin”, she said. Yay, thanks for the info…
She also played the piano. This I remember very clearly. She did not play with the extraordinary perfection of someone I got to know later… because she was self-taught, but it was magical anyway. I think she played “Für Elise” and “Ballade pour Adeline”… The windows in the living room were partly clouded by birch trees, and the sun that fell in through the leaves made dancing patterns on the floor; I watched the shadows dance. And I watched Sue. She was beautiful; a little dark fairy with a gorgeous smile. Her black hair was natural; her eyes were brown and her skin was tanned. She didn’t have any styling products in her hair that day, so it was very soft. It fell softly down on the golden curve of her neck, and I wanted desperately to touch her. It was painful because I knew that I couldn’t because she belonged to someone else - the one who saw her first - and she didn’t even know how I felt. I didn’t tell her.
Her mother came home in the afternoon, and she started to make dinner and a birthday cake. Sue went into town, on her bike, because she needed to buy a shirt, and it would go much quicker if she took her bike, so I stayed. While we waited, one of the mother’s friends from church showed up (they were Catholics; Sue wasn’t practising). This was an old little lady (like 80 or so) who was very nice and sweet. She had been a Swedish and Latin teacher. I enjoyed talking to her, and the mother was very nice too. I often get along very well with people’s parents…
After the dinner, Sue got a phone call from one of her friends. This was a boy who had recently lost his father (who committed suicide!) and he needed someone to talk to. She explained to me that she had to go to him. And she did.
She was gone a long time, and while I waited for her, I wrote a letter. “Dearest Amelia, may I come to you and cry?”… I remember that I started the letter that way and I told her about everything that had happened (this was one of the letters she replied quickly to, thankfully). It was already late when Sue came back. We took a walk in the dark again, and then we went to bed. I was going home the next day, at noon. But Sue was leaving a couple of hours earlier, going to Rebecka. So, she hugged me and said goodnight, and I think that I didn’t fall asleep so easily that night on my mattress in the living room.
The next morning, she hugged me and said goodbye so quickly that I hardly had time to notice. This was one of the more painful moments of the weekend; she disappeared from me too quickly and I felt that I was never going to see her again. I had wanted to love her, I had been ready to love her, but she didn’t even see it, and she was gone.
So I spent a few hours with her mother. She was a Maths teacher, and her Swedish was far from the perfection of that of her daughter, but we could communicate. I corrected a letter about something for someone… When she walked me to the bus that was going to take me to the train, she invited me to come with them (and Elin and Fredrik) to Poland that summer. She talked about her grandchild, Sue’s nephew; “He is a very, very nice boy, I’d like you to meet him, he would like you so much…”
Absurd, don’t you think?! I couldn’t tell the poor woman that I didn’t care about her grandson because I was in love with her daughter…
I wrote a letter to Sue while I waited for the train. I didn’t tell her about all my feelings, I don’t really remember what I wrote but probably something sentimental and sweet… and I guess I finished the letter to Amelia.
Then, on the train, I cried.
When I came back home (this was the summer before I moved to Uppsala, aka The City of Ghosts) I didn’t know what to say. I had told my parents that I was going to see “a friend” so they wouldn’t be prepared to see me heartbroken. (I don’t remember if this was before or after I came out to my mum) Luckily for me, I guess, I had already arranged to go with my Grandmother that same day (or maybe it was the next day) and spend a few days with her. In the car with her, I told her everything, and she felt sorry for me. “Poor you; tell me all about it and have a good cry, then when we get home, you’ll have a big glass of wine and then you’ll sleep…” She also told me that “this is only the first time; you’re going to go through many things like this in your life, and sometimes, you’re going to be the one to make someone cry…”
I believed, of course, that I was never, ever going to get over Sue. I was never ever going to be happy again. One thing I did later, and I’m glad I did, is that I wrote one more letter to Sue where I actually told her a little about how I felt. So we talked about it. Her point of view was that she had not meant to make me fall in love with her because her being so open and passionate is just her way of being friendly, and she didn’t mean for me to read too much into all her words… of course.
We stayed in touch for a while, but not very much because it was hard for me. She broke up with “the vegan dyke from hell” who had “stolen” her from me (I don’t know why and how), fell in love with and was left by someone else… I think it was five years since the last time I heard from her; she told me that she was happy. She had been diagnosed bipolar, but she was getting help. She also lived with an older woman (meaning about ten years older than her) who had a child.
And I got over her. If falling in love with someone else is a good sign, then it took like four months… which is nothing, compared to you know what. But as you can see, I still remember this, because it turned out to be a big and important experience.
It was almost ten years ago. And it was all an illusion, a sweet dream. But for a couple of weeks, I was happy, I had hope, and I even dared to jump on a train to meet her. That was really a huge step for me, especially at that age. Afterwards, I was glad that I did it because it proved to me that I can do things if I’m motivated enough, if they seem important enough. So, once, ten years ago, I did something important.
Next topic: My parents, in great detail. (But I promise, it will be less detailed than this…)