this one goes out to the one i love
Originally published at The Off-Center. Please leave any comments there.
I thought I fell in love for the first time in the third grade with a boy named [redacted]. He used to sing the boy parts in Phantom of the Opera, and I got to be his Christine. His family went hunting in Africa and we played hide-and-seek in a room full of stuffed exotic animals - full-sized bears, a tiger, deer, all manner of foul - and even in his own house, he always let me find him. He gave me a necklace with a star on it for my birthday that year. That is when I frst started to love little stars.
Then there was [redacted], whose brain I wanted to crawl inside of just to look around. There was no real lust there, even as a high-schooler with hormones raging. I just wanted him to talk to me about eastern philosophy and literature and computer science. I wanted to be close to him the way his guy friends got to be close to him. I wanted him to let me read his journals. I wanted him to tell me secrets. Sometimes he did and I count myself blessed that he has remained, to this day, a very dear friend to me. There was always real love there, as it turns out. It was just the kind of love that develops between friends, born of profound respect and admiration.
I actually fell in love for the first time with a boy named [redacted]. Against all odds and despite all logical rationale to the contrary, I fell completely in love with someone I had never met. It’s so silly, looking back on it now, and yet when we finally did meet, I knew it wasn’t make-believe from deep inside the heart of a lonely teenager. We met telling stories to one another, huge, uncommon, romantic stories and we built them together and loved each other building them. I have never talked to anyone on the phone as much as I talked to him. We spent normal sleep-cycles talking, we fell asleep talking, we woke up talking. He knew me better than anyone had ever known me. I fell in love with someone wanting to hear even my mundane stories; he made me a story-teller. We were the best versions of ourselves when we were together. That’s a beautiful fucking thing.
Then there was [redacted], whom I loved without knowing it. She was, and continues to be, a powerful source of inspiration for me. We were driving once to her house in Holly, and it was pitch dark out, but she turned off her headlights and said, “Look”, and in front of us were a hundred glittering lights - she turned orange construction posts into something amazing. And that’s the power she had, to turn anything at all into something beautiful. I really wish, above all else, that I could be more like her. I love her still and wish I got to see her more often so that she could teach me that kind of selfless generosity.
At 17, there was [redacted] who taught me more about the act of love in one brief, bookended summer than anyone else ever has. After what had happened to me the previous year, he drew me out of my closed-off shell and told me that it was a wonderful thing, to be touched.
Ah, [redacted]. The one that got away. I hope we get to see each other again some day, because I got that message. The one that said that I was the one that got away, too.
And now there is M., who I will not write about here, because he knows, and I know. I’m just happy that he’s home now, asleep in the room next to mine.
So why the long personal history? Because I find it very difficult to write about love and tonight I have been working on a love scene. As a woman, I didn’t want to get… I don’t know… caught up in love stories? I’m not sure why, but I resisted them. And now I don’t know how to portray it, because so much of it was felt with the vital intensity of a teenager. And the love I have now I still don’t understand or know how to traverse.
ALICE
When I am first with a new lover, I begin to truly, intensely miss the old ones, beyond reason or explanation. Because the reality of it was that they were all hugely disappointing, completely underwhelming and totally forgettable. But then I fall into the arms of someone new, someone full of possibilities, and I love all of them more, more than the new guy and more than I ever did when I was with them.
DANIEL
And you’re thinking of them now.
ALICE
Because I feel like a mosaic, I am the pieces of me they let me keep. I’m not sure what happened to the rest of me. I am the bits of the Alice that I was with Andrew and the bits of the Alice that I was with Michael and so on, and so...
DANIEL
...what?
ALICE
I’m sorry, I’m totally busting our romantic moment here.
DANIEL
No, it’s ok. I want to know.
ALICE
I am haunted by the people in my life who took parts of me away with them. I feel stripped down, and it makes me wish I never knew them.
Love scenes, man. This is as close as I seem to be able to get.