a lesson from a fuck-up

The first time I saw the boy who became my first love, he was moving into the house next door. The moving van was stuck in the snow, and he appeared around the corner of the van, talking to the movers, probably about ideas to extricate the vehicle.

He was beautiful. He was tall and blond, and he gestured with graceful animation. When he smiled, the gray day appeared to be transformed to dazzling sunlight, like sunflowers laughing in the sun.

I started baking cookies right away. It was a snow day from school. I had time to be neighborly.

As soon as they were finished, I took them over. It was love at first sight.

We spent the next two weeks together whenever I wasn't at school. He was helping his family unpack and didn't start school right away. When he did start, things got weird because I ran with the theatre crowd and he was a stoner. It didn't mesh. We still hung out. He had a bad relationship with his stepfather, and sometimes he'd come over to my house after they'd had a fight.

He'd sit, brooding, and we'd make a fire. Sometimes we'd make out. We still liked each other, but the chasm of our high school groups made it impossible to be together in the holding hands in the hallway kind of way. Finally I lost my virginity to him on the floor of my basement. I loved it. I loved him. I knew it wasn't going to change anything about the situation, but I was glad to have that kind of closeness with him.

That night, he went went home slightly after curfew. His stepfather yelled at him. My boy turned on his heel and left, hitching to the highway and going to live with his brother in Albany.

He wrote me to apologize. Then he enlisted in the navy. He wrote me once from a battleship in the Pacific.

Collette wrote, "First love is the only thing we die from."

She was right.

Sorry I'm so depressing. I'll get over it. I think it's the stress of the move, plus something someone wrote to me yesterday that was like a kick in the gut. That's what made me think about that boy.

Here's why. A couple years later, he came back from the Navy, showing up at my house out of the blue. His family still lived next door, but he kept most of his waking hours at my house. It was summer and I was home from college.

I wouldn't say it was his finest hour. He was a trainwreck. He'd been awol for months, and was drinking and doing a lot of drugs. He'd been doing porno to survive. When he showed up at my house, he was overly animated and flushed, talking too fast and saying nothing. After he'd been around for a couple days and I saw that he was in pretty bad shape all around, I took it upon myself to set him straight. I lectured him severely. Told him he was flushing his life down the toilet, etc. I was pretty harsh. He didn't say a word.

That night, I took him to a party I'd been invited to. He was a total embarassment. He was stoned and sloppily, charmlessly drunk. He knocked over a table full of drinks and my friends were glaring at me like "WHO IS THIS IMBECILE?" Finally I said, "Let's go home."

In the car, he didn't say anything for a long time. But then he said, "You know Cupcake, I have a lot of faults. But one thing I never do is make someone feel bad about themselves."

He said it quietly, and clearly, and with more dignity than I'd have guessed he possessed at that time. And I realized he was that drunk and stoned because what I'd said had upset him tremendously. I realized that I'd made him hate himself. Which only made things worse.

There were other ways I could have said the things I said. I could have tried to have compassion. He must have been really confused at that time. He must have been regretful about dropping out of school, and about other things he'd done. He was probably scared. And he was probably hanging around at my house because I felt safe to him, and he trusted me to love him unconditionally. But instead of helping him find his way out of pain, I told him how his ways of dealing with his problems made him a fuck-up. And feeling like you're a fuck-up just makes you fuck-up more.

and then he went away. forever.

I wonder how he is. I wish I could tell him, now that I know a little bit more about life, about how sometimes pain and loneliness and confusion make us do strange things-- I wish I could tell him that I'm sorry.