I loved, I think

A few weeks ago, I tracked down a friend from my childhood. I haven't completely stopped thinking about him since I was eight, which is when my family moved away from West Virginia. I was really young, maybe six, when I felt that I had fallen in love with him. He went to the same babysitter (check out my post about JEAN) It started off like this: all the kids would be sitting around watching cartoons. I would whisper in his ear "let's do the secret thing" and we would disappear into the other room. Then he would kiss me on my cheek and I would kiss him back. But of course, real love isn't just physical-- I remember feeling like I had a special secret that nobody in the world could possibly understand. When we weren't together, he was always in the back of my mind. When my parents told me we were moving to Tennessee, I immediately thought about him and realized that I might never see him again.

People think children are not capable of forming complex or romantic relationships, but they're wrong. I think I was in love, and I think I had a pretty complex understanding of what he meant to me and what would be gone when I left town. I told Zoe about him a few weeks ago and she insisted that I track him down again. I didn't know how to spell his name (a very unusual name) and I didn't know his last name or where he currently lived, but after a few google searches and some creative respellings, I found him on facebook. I immediately recognized his face. The story is kind of anticlimactic from there, but I was relieved to know that he remembered me. When I mentioned the fact that he was pretty much my childhood boyfriend, he didn't reply. He probably doesn't remember it the way I do (he probably doesn't remember it at all), but this has been real in my head for such a long time that even if my recollection is hazy, I can remember exactly how it felt to be loved by someone who wasn't required by law to love me. I can remember having my cheek kissed in that cramped little room while the other kids our age were fixated on Tom and Jerry.

There's a chance he will read this, and another chance that it will make him so uncomfortable that he will never talk to me again. But it doesn't matter, because this memory, even if filled with half-truths and hyperboles, is real to me and the person he is now is not a character in my story. When we remember a story, we also create it. I'm happy with what I've come up with.

Here I was, daydreaming about him....