(no subject)
And Emily was thinking--could not help thinking--of the time she and Teddy had sat there. The odd part was that she did not think of him longingly or lovingly. She just thought of him. --L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest
Monday would have marked my seventeenth anniversary with my first serious boyfriend. That was a Monday, too. President's Day.
This is not something I mention with any kind of regret or sadness. It's just a thing that always occurs to me on that day. February 16th.
Just like Monday, that other February 16th--The Original, I just thought of it as, The First--was cold and dreary. I remember a lot about that afternoon, like that I marathoned Daria when I got home from school (it was a snow make-up day). I had to wade from the bus to my front door in water knee-high, so I changed into sweatpants, which I then promptly spilled chocolate milk all over. I wore those same pants to bed Monday night, come to think of it. It's cool, the drink didn't stain, or if it did, seventeen years of washings have erased all the evidence.
I looked up a song I heard on Daria (it was a cover of "You Showed Me," by the Turtles) and found myself on a Daria forum. And that's where I met him. A person I would eventually move 900 miles to live beside. A person I spent eight years with. A person who changed my life in countless ways.
It's strange to think that my everyday life unfolding from those hours seventeen years ago. I thought I was spending a rain-gray winter afternoon at home alone, watching TV and playing on the Internet, but things were set in motion I had no idea until much later.
Not like the day I got my first ever boyfriend. I could tell something was going to happen, that day. Was happening.
My first ever boyfriend came near the beginning of 8th grade. I spent that morning with menstrual cramps and a terrible mood. At a school assembly that day, the principal couldn't get our attention long enough to tell us to shut the hell up, so he instead started doing the Macarena. This was 1996, when it was still on the radio. Eventually, the song started playing over the sound system and teachers joined in the dance. Finally, so did the students.
Not me, of course. A) I'd never learned it and B) I didn't dance and C) what the fuck, middle school? What the fuck? My homeroom teacher took my hands and tried to pull me to my feet, but I yanked myself away and stayed seated. She threw her hands up, clucking, "Oh, Steph, you're no fun!" My abdomen was slowly killing me, I had a miserable headache, and now an entire gym crammed with people were making noise at top volume. I sat in the middle of all that clamor and shouted to no one in particular, "I HATE THIS FUCKING SCHOOL."
I don't even remember what the assembly was about.
The family dog, Cheyenne, had been spayed that day. She had to be walked around the backyard on a leash, so as not to disturb her stitches. And after dinner that night, I offered to take her.
It wasn't just that I was feeling better, although my aches had subsided and my mood was improved. It wasn't the mellow September evening, either, although we had been treated to early tints of a gorgeous sunset over our meal. Maybe it was the expectant rustle from the trees waiting behind the house. But something was whispering to me that things were going to happen.
Cheyenne and I slowly made rounds of the backyard. She sniffed the grass; I watched the slowly changing sky. We lived in a duplex, but we never saw the neighbors. Any of them, really, although it was a nice neighborhood. A cornfield extended for about a mile behind the house before hitting a treeline. There were a handful of new houses behind ours. There wasn't much to see.
Except. The boy who lived behind me. Near the edge of his property, where yard gave way to farmland. He was slamming a golf club mercilessly against a tree.
It was not in my nature to speak to someone unsolicited, particularly to a boy, most particularly to a boy I thought was cute. But the trees around us were still waiting and whispering, so I waved and called over, "Having fun, Joe?"
We talked at the fence for at least half an hour. And then he asked if I'd take a walk with him. After the sun went down, we sat on the curb together at our bus stop and he asked me out. We said goodnight under the trees between our houses, finally silenced in their whispering, now quietly watching. He asked if he could kiss me and I shyly shook my head. If he had pressed me for a reason, I probably would have stammered something prosaic. The truth was that my heart was beating so fast and so hard that I sincerely believed that I would faint if he kissed me.
Oh, thirteen.
The next evening, my parents and I had dinner in that same dining room with the backdoor once again propped open for us to enjoy the view of that same patch of sky turning that same shade of pink over those same trees. And I remembered how I'd been looking out there the evening before, thinking that if I took my dog outside, it was somehow going to change my life.
That doesn't happen often, though, I think. Not to me, anyway. Sometimes you recognize the turning points, because they're huge and obvious, but mostly you don't. They pass like a rain-gray winter afternoon at home alone, watching TV and playing on the Internet. And suddenly, everything's different.
Monday would have marked my seventeenth anniversary with my first serious boyfriend. That was a Monday, too. President's Day.
This is not something I mention with any kind of regret or sadness. It's just a thing that always occurs to me on that day. February 16th.
Just like Monday, that other February 16th--The Original, I just thought of it as, The First--was cold and dreary. I remember a lot about that afternoon, like that I marathoned Daria when I got home from school (it was a snow make-up day). I had to wade from the bus to my front door in water knee-high, so I changed into sweatpants, which I then promptly spilled chocolate milk all over. I wore those same pants to bed Monday night, come to think of it. It's cool, the drink didn't stain, or if it did, seventeen years of washings have erased all the evidence.
I looked up a song I heard on Daria (it was a cover of "You Showed Me," by the Turtles) and found myself on a Daria forum. And that's where I met him. A person I would eventually move 900 miles to live beside. A person I spent eight years with. A person who changed my life in countless ways.
It's strange to think that my everyday life unfolding from those hours seventeen years ago. I thought I was spending a rain-gray winter afternoon at home alone, watching TV and playing on the Internet, but things were set in motion I had no idea until much later.
Not like the day I got my first ever boyfriend. I could tell something was going to happen, that day. Was happening.
My first ever boyfriend came near the beginning of 8th grade. I spent that morning with menstrual cramps and a terrible mood. At a school assembly that day, the principal couldn't get our attention long enough to tell us to shut the hell up, so he instead started doing the Macarena. This was 1996, when it was still on the radio. Eventually, the song started playing over the sound system and teachers joined in the dance. Finally, so did the students.
Not me, of course. A) I'd never learned it and B) I didn't dance and C) what the fuck, middle school? What the fuck? My homeroom teacher took my hands and tried to pull me to my feet, but I yanked myself away and stayed seated. She threw her hands up, clucking, "Oh, Steph, you're no fun!" My abdomen was slowly killing me, I had a miserable headache, and now an entire gym crammed with people were making noise at top volume. I sat in the middle of all that clamor and shouted to no one in particular, "I HATE THIS FUCKING SCHOOL."
I don't even remember what the assembly was about.
The family dog, Cheyenne, had been spayed that day. She had to be walked around the backyard on a leash, so as not to disturb her stitches. And after dinner that night, I offered to take her.
It wasn't just that I was feeling better, although my aches had subsided and my mood was improved. It wasn't the mellow September evening, either, although we had been treated to early tints of a gorgeous sunset over our meal. Maybe it was the expectant rustle from the trees waiting behind the house. But something was whispering to me that things were going to happen.
Cheyenne and I slowly made rounds of the backyard. She sniffed the grass; I watched the slowly changing sky. We lived in a duplex, but we never saw the neighbors. Any of them, really, although it was a nice neighborhood. A cornfield extended for about a mile behind the house before hitting a treeline. There were a handful of new houses behind ours. There wasn't much to see.
Except. The boy who lived behind me. Near the edge of his property, where yard gave way to farmland. He was slamming a golf club mercilessly against a tree.
It was not in my nature to speak to someone unsolicited, particularly to a boy, most particularly to a boy I thought was cute. But the trees around us were still waiting and whispering, so I waved and called over, "Having fun, Joe?"
We talked at the fence for at least half an hour. And then he asked if I'd take a walk with him. After the sun went down, we sat on the curb together at our bus stop and he asked me out. We said goodnight under the trees between our houses, finally silenced in their whispering, now quietly watching. He asked if he could kiss me and I shyly shook my head. If he had pressed me for a reason, I probably would have stammered something prosaic. The truth was that my heart was beating so fast and so hard that I sincerely believed that I would faint if he kissed me.
Oh, thirteen.
The next evening, my parents and I had dinner in that same dining room with the backdoor once again propped open for us to enjoy the view of that same patch of sky turning that same shade of pink over those same trees. And I remembered how I'd been looking out there the evening before, thinking that if I took my dog outside, it was somehow going to change my life.
That doesn't happen often, though, I think. Not to me, anyway. Sometimes you recognize the turning points, because they're huge and obvious, but mostly you don't. They pass like a rain-gray winter afternoon at home alone, watching TV and playing on the Internet. And suddenly, everything's different.