The midsummer storms of adolescent love have unusual staying power.
On New Year’s Eve, 2007, my wife, Maria, and I attended a party in a Chicago high rise. The setting was comfortable and relaxed. I had known the host since high school, and many of the guests were friends from childhood. I expected no more than an evening of familiar faces and friendly conversation.
Maria and I were drinking wine near the kitchen with some people when Cora arrived. She and I instantly recognized each other. The surprise froze us for a moment, but I was elated to introduce the women: “This is Maria, my wife,” I said. “Maria, this is Cora. You remember? I told you stories about her.”
This was Love. Who could have known what torture it would be? No one told me it would be a pressing, incessant and claustrophobic secret full of mysteries and surprises.
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“Stories?” Maria asked.
Cora seemed to brace for something.
“You remember,” I pleaded. “This is Cora. I told you the whole story. From when I was a kid.”
“Oh, her!” my wife shouted, a bit tipsy. “Yeah, holy shit, he was totally in love with you.”
◊♦◊
Indeed, I had, as a child of fifteen, fallen helplessly over this girl, my first experience with overwhelming, all-absorbing, thoroughly embarrassing adolescent love.
Prior to this New Year’s Eve party, I had last seen Cora in the spring of 1996. We were at college, prepared to graduate in May; at that point in our lives we barely spoke to each other anymore. She was engaged to a guy named Kurt while I was preparing to leave for a European adventure.
Now we were standing at a plate of hors d’oeuvres in a high rise overlooking Chicago’s Millennium Park. I learned that Cora had divorced Kurt. She learned that I, prior to meeting Maria, had broken up with the girl I dated on and off in college, a woman Cora knew (and had little use for). I drew a quick outline of how Maria and I had met, summarized various global adventures and presented Cora with one question after the next. We realized we had a lot to talk about and agreed to meet at a café.
♦◊♦
Unexpected feelings arose before our meeting. I was recalling so much of my youth, ultra-vivid memories alongside strange confusion. Why are these memories so awkward? I felt longing and anxiety at the same time. Annoyed with myself, I anticipated a phone call from Cora with lump-in-my-throat and sweat-in-my-palms nervousness, identical to the kind I had felt as a teen. Set to loop at all hours—to come up as I made coffee or waited for the bus—was the memory of the moment I had felt myself smitten:
Cora and I had been in Michigan for summer camp. I’d met her on the second day and spent the rest of camp feeling nervous any time she was around, pining for her company when she was elsewhere.
I was supposed to fall in love with one of Charlie’s Angels. Instead it was a girl with a retainer, ponytail and acne.
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Presently, on a humid midsummer afternoon, Cora and her friend were at my campground. I can’t recall the topic of our chat, only the sensations: my chest filled with mattress foam, tennis balls stuffed down my throat. Cora soon said, “I have to go.” I said bye and watched the girls disappear down a forest pathway. Turning to some useless task, I eventually heard their giggling. They were strutting goofy, Cora’s smile awkward, and she said, “We’re back.” The girls sat at a picnic table near my tent—the friend a sidekick, there only for support—and Cora smiled as if to say, I’d rather be here now.
Her eye contact sent an electric wind straight through me, shocking down to the marrow. The crackling-white gust left me forever changed, and the next few hours of life have been deleted from my brain.
The feelings energized and horrified me. As I lay that night in my sleeping bag, a summer storm discharging in my chest, I knew I could never share the feeling with anyone, certainly not with Cora. I thought it would go away but things only intensified: for the rest of camp, I had a lightning bolt for a spine and thunderheads in my crotch, no idea what to do about them. I got Cora’s address and telephone number, happy to learn she was also from Chicagoland. One night I managed to ask her to dance, if the word applies: we swayed back and forth to some slow 80’s schlock, both of us smelling of Deep Woods Off, and my heart could have rammed through my rib cage, bounced to the nearest blender and shredded itself.
After camp we started writing letters. I anticipated postal deliveries the way I’d shudder delightfully before sticking my wet pinky into the bulb socket of my Lite-Brite game (a friend and I had invented this show of manhood in fourth grade). This was Love. Fucking Love. It existed at the postbox. Who could have known what torture it would be? No one told me it would be a pressing, incessant and claustrophobic secret full of mysteries and surprises.
I was supposed to fall in love with one of Charlie’s Angels. Instead it was a girl with a retainer, ponytail, acne and a habit of accentuating speech by gently brushing the underside of her nose with the topside of a forefinger. In short: she was the most beautiful creature in the world. And what enormous power she had. She could, with one word, send me to my doom.
This is what people long for? This is what all those slow songs are about?
◊♦◊
A friend of mine—she played the role of big sister—advised me to share my feelings with Cora. She taught me love’s brutal math: in order for it to equal something greater than zero, two people had to feel it together. The only way to learn what numbers you had was to set yourself up for rejection. The bright side to rejection was that, when it was all over, the thunderheads dumped their rain and disappeared. Or so I was told.
There’s conceit in keeping a boy around when you know his heart throbs.
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Whatever rouge of tenderness Cora had felt for me the day she had skipped back to the picnic table remained merely tender rouge. I learned this only a few months after getting my driver’s license. Seated next to me in my romantic Buick Regal, Cora told me, in no uncertain terms, that we could only ever be friends. Deep in some dungeon closet of my consciousness, the place where I went to retire beaten armor, I had always known this would happen. I had also always known, long before I drove her home that night, that rejection would leave me wondering What’s wrong with me? In the wake of the thunderheads, that incessant question remained. If I knew what was wrong, maybe I could fix it.
♦◊♦
Almost two decades later, the same question, again. I was waiting anxiously for Cora to return my phone call. Anxiety? Over what? I’m an adult. I’m married. What’s wrong with me?
My wife sensed my weirdness while I sat watching hockey. She wondered if there was anything I wanted to talk about.
Interestingly, Maria had only recently run into her own first love. It had been on a trip we had taken to her hometown of Kiev. For days she had walked around bashful, avoiding prolonged eye contact. I recall seeing her flushed as she was cutting cucumbers, and she babbled through laughter: “Nothing! There’s nothing about me! Go away!”
Perhaps this experience made it easier for me to admit: “Maria, I’m kinda wigging over this meeting with Cora.”
My wife laughed gently. She has this way of enlightening me to my own emotions by pitching her voice to a direct but impossibly kind tone: “You were really young. Those were crazy strong feelings,” she said. “In some ways, they’re the strongest emotions we’ll ever feel. You’re a writer. It’s a gift to feel them again.”
◊♦◊
I realized there was a larger awareness to gain. Cora had not just been an object of high school desires, the love of a teen hysteric. She had also been, for a chunk of my formative years, among the few people who ever listened to me: a kid growing up in the confusing tyranny of an alcoholic household.
Boys in love are fools, we say. And then we shame them for their foolishness.
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I was that son of drunks whose armor was to play the obnoxious clown. This flawed if cheap defense usually ruined what chances I had to form the relationships I wanted. Somehow, Cora saw through the clown to someone different. While she rejected my advances, she still provided years of safety. In letters and phone calls, I dumped every sort of confusion and fear her way, and she always listened.
I know there are readers who’ll bark at me for letting myself remain in “the friend zone”, a term that’s supposed to be negative. Sure, there’s conceit in keeping a boy around when you know his heart throbs. Yet it wasn’t a one-way street: Cora learned secrets about me no one else did, not my parents, anyone in my family or a single male friend. I could not quell my attraction; my volatile emotions soon exhausted both of us, and we went our separate ways. But the endless telephone conversations and pages of letters (all of which I’ve kept) hold greater meaning now—and did much more to aid me towards solace—than any of the sexual adventures I had prior to getting married. I’ve met ex-girlfriends at weddings and funerals to exchange pleasantries and rarely hear from them again. I stumbled into one old girlfriend after moving back to the States and felt completely annoyed. One casual sex partner I had in college, rather immodest in her preferences, pretended not to remember me when I ran into her in a bar. None of these women had kept me in the friend zone. Our relationships were based on something utterly forgettable.
♦◊♦
Cora and I met up in a North Side Chicago café and talked for hours, sharing freely. I learned all about her tumultuous divorce, the only option after her husband developed OCD and started hoarding recyclables, obsessed with their proper disposal but frightened of their germs. In almost 19th century fashion, he picked a mistress from among Cora’s available friends, casting a wide net to entangle people in his drama.
After hearing Cora’s stories, riding the train home, I had a curious sense. Similar to Cora’s ex-husband, I was also a Henry Jekyll. The mature adult was pleased to hear that Cora had come out of a difficult conflict with her health and sanity, a good job at a top Chicago hospital, a network of supportive people. Seated alongside the listening adult, invisible but fully extant, was the enamored teen, the self-obsessed boy still wondering what was wrong with him.
Side-by-side, these personalities informed one another. What was wrong with that boy? One thing, namely: he couldn’t stop wondering what was wrong with him. The adult could see this and correct it. At the same time, the adult depended on the kid to understand what endures. Among the most persistent energies in the world is the love a fifteen year old boy can feel. Beautifully painful, delicate as spider silk, massive as the sea behind the levy, all sense washes away when it breaks. Boys in love are fools, we say. And then we shame them for their foolishness, ask What’s wrong with you? Control yourselves. Real men don’t feel that way.
Photo by shock264
There is no love like a childhood love. It’s a powerful machine that is unparalleled. And it stays with you like a haunting.
Beautiful post.
I’ve never had this experience of running into a lost love, and nor have I ever been a lovesick boy (though a lovesick girl is equally foolish). But I agree with Steve. What a beautifully written and thoughtful journey.
Thank you for writing this. I’m going through a little bit of this right now and it’s helping me to seek some clarity in my own life.
25 years after we broke up, I reunited with my first love. It started on Facebook, moved on to text message, then 4-hour long phone calls. Three months after our first conversation, I had retired from the Air Force and moved to her town to be with her. Two years later, and she still makes me feel like a love sick teenager at the age of 43.
Turbine, that’s just great! And people say Facebook is a waste of time. You *are* a love-sick teen, and it’s fantastic in my book.
I Love It…
Ah, the days when I wonder why exactly am I facebook friends with my childhood crushes ^_^
Eh. Interesting times 🙂
My wife’s the greatest person I’ve ever met.
You took me on a journey there, Gint. Her name was Kim. Dark hair and eyes, olive skin, and a mind that oozed intelligence and sensuality. I started feeling all that stuff again. Good stuff it is! Thanks! And your wife sounds like a dream. Congrats.