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| Me, the year I kissed my first boy, and my sister. |
At my 20 year high school reunion,
I heard the same news everyone always hears, that some of the classmates who
were absent, were not able to be there because they had passed away. One of the
deaths was a shock. He was one of my oldest friends, a childhood playmate. It
hurt. It hurt to find out how he died.
Some people were surprised to
discover the depth of my hurt. I get it. We stopped really socializing in the
tidal influx of new students in Middle School and in High School, no one would
have known we ever knew each other. We didn’t speak until the last semester of
senior year, when we worked on the senior show together.
We had a moment.
It was always weird before then.
When I got to high school I was trying to reinvent myself, to start over
emotionally, in a sea of people who didn’t know my early struggles, who didn’t
know my secrets. But he knew mine and I knew his. And it was weird.
He lived at the end of my block and
we knew each other best when we were still learning who we were, still basking
in the promise that we could be anything, anyone. That meant a lot to both of
us. I knew a boy who was quick and creative, who was cleverly inventive. We
would figure out what we wanted to play and he would figure out how, as if he
had mapped the landscape of our neighborhood in his head.
We reenacted Star Wars often. I was
Leia and T.J. was Han, because he had dark hair, and another boy, Derek, was
Luke, because he had blond hair. We were crafty five year olds, using the back
of a garage as a detention center and the secret room beneath a tree fort as a
trash compactor. We didn’t know the whole story yet, but we made up our own
versions.
He was clever and bright and
thoughtful, and once he knew you, he was a good-natured trickster. He was also
a boy who liked to do things for shock value, or because he had already deemed
them to be another way to get it done, even if it wasn’t the same way everyone
else was doing it. Or because he was owning something that was hard for him,
before anyone could make fun of him for it. Little kids can be little bastards
sometimes.
I know what his home life was like.
I was there. He was sometimes in a dark mood, even when we were small, and it
always seemed to come from somewhere outside of our wild pack of children
running around. But even when he was upset, he was never mean to me. That
matters.
In middle school, I was somewhere I
shouldn’t have been instead of where I said I was going to be. And so was he.
Our paths crossed and we acknowledged each other with surprise. See. in a crazy way, we grew up a family of about two dozen kids on our block. Even though
we weren’t friends, we were cousins of a kind. He always kept my secret and I kept his.
We didn’t speak again until the last
semester of senior year. I was performing in the Senior Play and he was working
stage crew and tech for it. We were on a short break.
“Why did we stop being friends?” he
asked me backstage. I shrugged.
“We knew too much about each other.
It was awkward.” He nodded thoughtfully. I could see the little boy in his face.
Sometimes for me, the time and distance falls away so easily, and I squeezed
his hand conspiratoriously. “We had a good run, playing at war in the summer
time. We had fun.”
He laughed. “You were really good
at rescuing prisoners from the fort,” he remembered.
“I never got caught.”
He said he got involved in the play
because he wanted to be part of something fun before he graduated. He said he
understood why I liked it, that it was good people. And, as was usual with him,
the weight of what he didn’t say, the weight of what we knew about each other
spoke volumes.
The last time we saw each other, I
was walking my parent’s dog home on break. He waved and smiled at me, walking
over to catch up for a moment. Leather, my parent’s dog, loved him. He was
always good with animals, especially frightened ones. It wasn’t something he
lost when his eyes flashed dark, so many thoughts fighting for dominance. The
last thing I saw was him smiling, the boy I used to know flashing across that
smile.
He’s the first boy I remember kissing.
We were five years old and he was my first boyfriend. But I hadn’t seen Return
of the Jedi yet. In my version of Star Wars, Leia dumped Han for Luke, and
Derek became boyfriend #2. We were still five.
I hope you are at peace. I hope you
are getting to do all of the exploring you always wanted to do. It’s a vast
system of worlds. Happy hunting, TJ.
