Look at those tans! The second summer after we met...Oh how much has changed..
I have been falling in love too fast for as long as I can remember. At the age of six, I cornered a rather unsuspecting classmate, pushed him against the rosy pink tiled hallway of Maplewood Elementary School and kissed him purposefully on the lips. He had been my constant companion since preschool. We frequently made the third child in our daily carpool sit up front with the driver because we couldn’t bear even that separation between us. And also, I think, because it gave us a fantastic opportunity to make some silly faces behind her back. We were then placed in different first grade classrooms. Then, I thought it was a cruel twist of fate and that the whole world was out to get me. Now, I see that it is probably more likely that we giggled a little too loudly during our jump-up day and were labeled as a teacher’s headache waiting to happen.
I was, nonetheless, absolutely devastated by our separation. The kiss, in my six year old mind, would fix it all- for that’s how Sleeping Beauty woke up again, and how Prince Charming emerged from the body of a toad. My sentiments of true love were not shared. The response from my counterpart was a resounding “Gross! Girl cooties!!!” as he frantically used his sleeve to wipe his face clean. I ran off, red faced, and we did not speak again until one particularly embarrassing encounter in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, at age thirteen. We were prompted into memories by our mothers, overly eager at our reunion. All I could remember was my presumptuous age-six kiss.
This is a pattern which has continued throughout my life. I not only fell in love with people- I fell desperately in love with ideas, future plans for myself…most of which dissipated easily and quickly.
When I examine this pattern, I am transported immediately to a musty ground level apartment, located down several one-way streets in a not-so-nice part of town. I feel the familiar anticipation in my flip-flop clad feet as I traveled down the stairs which were wrapped in horrible green colored carpet, to the door with its peeling white paint. No matter the time of day or if anyone was home, this door was always unlocked. It was here that I allowed myself to fall drastically and deeply in love once again. I would like to try to blame the fact that this transition took only a few weeks on the oppressive summer heat and its intoxicating properties. However, I recognize now that it wasn’t the heat, but the idea of freedom, of rebellion, of simply being young- that’s what I was enamored with. And I was enamored with you. You, tall and so thin that if you turned sideways I was often afraid I may lose sight of you entirely. You with your deep brown eyes and a large crooked scar (which I can still remember tracing with my fingertips) that ran the length of the back of your head. You with your lopsided smile and ability to make me laugh until tears blurred my vision and I thought of nothing at all but laughing.
The apartment. I suppose if I were to see it now, in the frigid month of February, it would lose the mystique that I have delicately wrapped it in. I try not to imagine it now, empty and cold, but instead imagine it as I knew it then, with the hot July sun beating down through the sliding glass doors. It had very little furniture and only one fan. No air conditioning, of course. In the center of the small living room was a large rust-colored pleather couch that at the start of its life must have been intended to sink into, softly. It had been well used since then, and often when I sat down I had the feeling of not sinking, but plummeting, directly onto the springs below. And still, some of my fondest memories involved sliding my hot, sticky legs down the cool pleather and curling up with a book, rather unsure of when you, the sole occupant of the apartment, would return. Not only was the apartment lacking furniture, it also lacked the general comforts that our generation has come to depend on. There was no telephone, no television and no computer. Even cell phones seemed to conveniently lose all signal as soon as my feet crossed the threshold. An existence without these distractions, although it sounds terrible to me now, was surprisingly liberating. Hours were spent in simple conversation, heated debates, and even once, a game of Monopoly that resulted in one of the key players overturning the board, flinging his remaining funds at the banker, and storming out into the kitchen.
The sliding door had no screens to obstruct the view of the meandering river behind the apartment complex. The river was rumored to contain leeches but we often threatened to jump into it anyway. The lack of screens made it particularly frightening to you. You, who thought you were invincible in so many aspects of life, had a terrible fear of spiders. If any unknowing visitors slid open the door to let in the night air or attempt to get more cell phone reception, your voice rose several octaves. This spectacle was followed by a superman like dive to slide the door shut before any eight legged perpetrators could crawl in.
I learned to navigate the winding driveway of your apartment with tears burning red hot in my eyes because you leaned against my car and you told me nothing but the truth and everything you’d shown me scared me. You told me all of the reasons why I should run full force in the opposite direction. We worked together, my parents didn’t like you, you had trouble being faithful, I had an ex-boyfriend who was still crazy about me, you had an ex-girlfriend who had left you a mess that you were still trying to clean up… and with my mind still reeling from all this, you would kiss me in a way that would firmly plant my arms around your neck and my heart upon my sleeve.
The one measure of technology that the apartment did contain was a gigantic 5 CD disk changing stereo system, which overtook the entire tiny entertainment center. From these giant speakers you would romance me with your country-western mixes that I pretended to like and eventually did and to this day I find myself pausing on the country radio station in my car, but only when I’m alone. I have single country tracks interspersed in my music library, each tucked away and delicately hidden so that if anybody came upon them, I could claim that my roommate must have downloaded it and I have no idea where it came from because I obviously don’t like country music. It was one of many things that I had wanted to share with you, but became one of my secrets instead.
I would bring over delights found in the frozen food section of the supermarket and we cooked bagel bites in the temperamental yellow oven for as long as our growling stomachs could wait, and then eat them so fast the tops of our mouths would burn and strings of greasy cheese would ooze off of the edges. The kitchen offered a measure of privacy and as such its off white painted walls were witness to countless petty arguments and stolen kisses. The only non-alcoholic drink that the fridge contained was Dr. Pepper and even on the coldest day that taste brings me summer. The case lasted me all season, because I was the only one who chose it from the more fun beverages. The oversized kitchen table, donated by some well-meaning relative, just barely fit and sat so flush to the wall that there was only room for the chairs if they were pushed all the way in. That table never saw a single meal. Instead, we pretended the ugly green carpet was warm summer grass and we picnicked around pizza boxes on the living room floor. We would eat until our stomachs hurt and then sprawl across the carpet, our fingers intertwined, searching your speckled ceiling for stars.
I was never allowed in your bedroom. You claimed it was always too messy but judging by the rest of the apartment, I had a hard time believing it wouldn’t be anything I hadn’t seen before. I knew, although you never told me, that your ex-girlfriend had never quite finished collecting all of her belongings and you worried that seeing her things in your room might shock me into some sort of understanding of your former life. I often thought you were hoarding secrets in that tiny room, little bits of you that I would never know. I was in your room only once. All the furniture, and all the secrets, had been cleared out and the room was perfectly empty. But still the essence of the secrets that were housed there seemed to permeate the entire room, and I knew that even in the layer of dust that lay across the top of the radiator there was something that I could never understand.
I helped you move out of that apartment at the end of the summer. I arrived, early in the morning, armed with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee (I still wasn’t sure how you liked it and you in typical fashion, made me guess, so I took the cheap way out, and brought you black coffee with creamers, sugar and artificial sweeteners just in case) a box full of Munchkins and cleaning supplies that I had swiped from underneath the sink in my parents’ house. The Munchkins never got eaten, and our cleaning crusade never made it past the kitchen counters as we ended up on the rust colored sofa, the sole remaining piece of furniture, laughing and reminiscing and trying to hold summer between the two of us for as long as we could stand it.
We often tried to recreate the feelings of that apartment once summer had come and gone, meeting in friends’ parents’ houses, in dorm rooms, at over crowded restaurants. But somehow, there was always the feeling of responsibilities, of people to answer to, lingering in the air. The feelings of carelessness could never quite be captured.
You lived for a time in your mother’s house. When I came to see you here, we would often plop onto her blue couch that smelled like cigarettes because she had a habit of chain smoking during Red Sox games. The coffee table was so cluttered, with clothes catalogues, plates and glasses from last night’s meal and Lego’s belonging to your younger brothers that there was very little room for me to rest my feet. But I always did anyways, with one ankle teetering uncertainly on the edge.
We watched episodes of Law & Order on this blue couch and you would always try and guess the ending and I would argue with you even if I secretly agreed. I never got to prove you wrong because we never made it all the way to the end of an episode. The comfortable silence that comes along with watching television was something we were decidedly uncomfortable with. Our relationship had blossomed without a television at all. At first, we would shut the TV off quickly and laugh with each other, quietly as to not wake up your brothers. As time went on, we sank into the silence and the distance between us, as the TV’s blue lights danced around, felt unbearable.
Once, we scoured your mom’s freezer at 3 am for any acceptable food and we found an “everything” pizza so we made it- and out of all the things you chose not to remember, you remembered that I hated olives. So you carefully picked them all off and to this day that sticks out in my mind as one of the nicest things you’ve ever done for me. Although it was probably a better quality pizza than our half-cooked bagel bites, I finished my piece feeling decidedly less satisfied.
At the beginning of the fall, I got so cold watching you play soccer that I had to borrow a red fleece that I had never seen you wear from the back of your car. I saw the uniform for the new job you had taken with your dad in Connecticut strewn carelessly in your backseat. As I pulled the fleece over my head and watched it fall all the way down to my knees, my heart sank as well. Summer was gone and sooner than I realized then, you would be too.
I was the last of all of our friends to see you in the state of New Hampshire. I shivered in your Mom’s driveway with a smile rigidly planted onto my face as I watched you climb into your blue Chevy Blazer and drive away. I wanted desperately to run after you, tears streaming down my face. Instead, I was frozen and there were no tears. The heat of the summer that had once made me so bold had been replaced with a bitter cold. The kind of cold that urged me to hide myself in bulky sweaters and endless knitting projects, emerging only when the snow has melted.
And as your voice grows more distant across the telephone lines, I wonder if it was the heat of the summer that was needed to keep us. And I wait. Knowing (or hoping) as the snow falls, that it can’t stay this cold forever.
I wrote this piece over...3 years ago. Obviously, my relationship with Andrew has changed and a lot has happened since that first summer, 5 years ago. But it speaks to the fact that love is transformative, but also, subjective. My memories of that first summer are undoubtedly romanticized and I know for a fact they are drastically different than Andrew's experiences & memories. I know now I wasn't the only girl to pass through the threshold of that apartment & I know that he had other, equally complicated, life-situations unfolding simultaneously. It is this naivety that also makes this summer so special to me. It was the last time, in my memory, that I lived completely free of battle wounds & calluses. Andrew & I's relationship has grown and shifted across the years. We have been best friends, enemies & partners. This forbearance, I feel,has strengthened our respect for each other. Our friendship makes it easier to see past his dirty laundry and his occasional bad moods. But it remains true to me that not only did I fall in love with Andrew that summer, as a person, but I fell in love with the freedom which that summer brought me. I realized what I needed &what I wanted. I let go of a lot of expectations I had created for myself and discovered the person I wanted to be, as opposed to the person I had slowly become. It gave me the confidence to truly separate myself from a long-term relationship that just wasn't quite right, the permission to have fun & let go of the persistent anxiety that had plagued me since high school.
It was a beautiful, challenging time. And writing this piece was, at the time, cathartic for me. I wanted to let go. Andrew was living in Connecticut by then, moved on to a new relationship. We still talked almost daily, but I didn't think he would ever be back in my everyday life. This piece was as much about my growth, my individual experiences, as it was about our summer "romance". Reading it now, I can't help but smile & feel the same warmth that that summer brought to me. And feel blessed that I still feel, with all my current knowledge, that there was a little magic in the air that first, initial summer.
Love's transformative power is not only limited to romantic relationships. It's effects spill over easily into friendships and the love you feel for family. Love is truly all around us. And it you let it, it will change you.
For the record, this little miss is my # 1 Valentine this year. She has changed my life, my whole idea of what it is to truly love someone. She stole my heart with her first breath of air & keeps it with every giggle and sigh and snuggle...
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