10.30.01.
The Invention of Love.
A Retrospective of My First Relationship, March 1995 - May 1996.
Love. The word is the most powerful ever invented. An inspiration, motivation and holy grail for those who would seek it; an unattainable goal and reminder of life's pain for those who have sought it and choose not to seek it again. The word emits a magnetic field around itself and slowly draws you in, like an unwary sailor who thinks he has charted a course far enough from the whirlpool. The sounds of love match the sounds of the word itself: the lingual luh rolling luxuriously off the tongue, lazy and licentious, strong and self-assured, full of sexiness and silliness; the long, wide uh, the easiest of any vowel, spread out to take its own word and sucking the consonants in, familiar and relaxed and vulnerable; the vvv, the clenching off of the word, very sudden, biting the lip in pain, in shock, but with a moan underneath it.
I was stumbling towards love and everything would change. There was a moment at the ice rink, sitting on the sides, lots of friends laughing and I can't pay attention at all. "...I love you." "What?" "I love you." "I think..." and the music starts and we are swept onto the ice and glide like swans (who always seem to know what they're doing).
It started on the second story of a double-decker bus. Most of my friends were piled into the back seat discovering sexuality, but I sat a few rows ahead, sleepily chatting with a girl I kind of knew. And she fell asleep leaning against the window, and I fell asleep leaning against her, and we had a blanket on top of us, and soon people were talking about us. Of all the occasions in my life there have been rumors about me, that was half of them. And what did I know? I was just a kid who fell asleep next to a girl on a bus.
A week later I was leaning against a rail after school when she walked up next to me and handed me a flower.
"Jarrod?" she said.
"Yeah?"
She paused, then spoke with apprehension but deliberation. "Would you go out with me?"
And thank god she asked, because I never would have (welcome to my life). But she did ask, that's the point, and off we went to several months of PDA and not-very-subtle making out behind the school.
The first kisses were at a movie with friends. I remember waiting with everyone beforehand, and she had not arrived yet, and Joel (always kind of an idiot) said, "Hey Jarrod, where's your other half?" and I was very embarrassed. And in the movie I spent twenty minutes with my face right next to hers, trying to build up the courage to kiss her, until finally she asked, "Jarrod, are you watching the movie," and like an idiot I said "Yes" and then finally I kissed her. And I kissed her one more time before the movie was over. It was the most proactive thing I've ever done in a relationship, and I'm glad she waited for me to do it. (If you ever read this: Thank you.)
I remember another kiss with her. It was July, right before she moved. (At the end of July I went to camp for a week, and when I came back she was gone.) She and Justin and I spent a day together just hanging out in the suburbs, just being casual before she would leave her boyfriend and her best friend to go to a school she hated in a place she didn't know. We wound up in a park, and we napped in the grass under a tree, and we played games on the playground. And she and I sat on a picnic table, and Justin said, "You two should kiss and I'll take a picture. I did this for my parents once." And so we did. And I still have the picture, but that's not why I remember the kiss.
We used to make out behind the school together. In retrospect, the degree to which I was obsessed with kissing probably annoyed her (or if it didn't, it should have), but she never said anything. We would kiss up by the lockers during breaks in chorus rehearsals, or behind the bushes after school. I don't remember how bad we were in public, but I do remember being teased and reprimanded by our peers for being so affectionate, and once or twice by the faculty. Propriety was not our priority.
There was a night before she left where Justin and Liz threw her a surprise party, where we all dressed up very nicely, and ate great food and talked and played charades for many hours. I remember that was the night that she told Liz and Hannah about her dad; she had told me a week before, maybe, and we all gave them space while they were talking. When we were giving her presents she said something like, "Oh you guys, I don't deserve all of this," and Hannah joked, "Oh, modesty, modesty. We know it's all false, Jennifer," and she took that one comment to heart, and for a year afterwards would still say, "Do you think Hannah hates me?" and I would say, "No, of course not," and we would proceed to analyze Hannah for an hour. This was not healthy behavior. (She was never great at treating herself well.)
She spent August at CTY, sort of a summer school for smart kids who were there because they wanted to be. She spent about a week of it carrying around a dopey yellow boombox wherever she went, and recording conversations and events and sometimes talking into it. Then she edited it down to the best two hours, and gave me the tape for our anniversary. Every once in a while I dig out the tape and listen to it, and she talks to me. The funny thing is, even today when I listen to it, there are times on the tape where something will happen and I'll laugh really loudly, and then on the tape she'll say, "Jarrod just laughed really loudly at that," or I'll hear something that I just have to respond out loud to, and then she'll respond as if she heard me. (I am not making this up.)
(In the last couple of years, we haven't talked all that much. It's kind of funny, really, because when we do talk we're great friends, and for an hour or a night we'll share each other's lives, and then we won't talk for four months. And I know, that kind of thing just happens sometimes. It's just too bad. It's entirely my fault - correspondence isn't my strong suit.)
I was always intimidated by her. She wrote music, she wrote fiction, she painted and danced, she sang, she got A's in all her classes and knew the entire dialogue of "When Harry Met Sally" by heart. She had lots of friends, and was creative, and knew how to have a good time. I always felt, and still feel, that I didn't deserve to be dating her.
After we broke up she dated one or two real assholes before she found the guy she's going to marry. Statistically speaking, I think I was a fluke in a pattern of guys she dated who were kind of screwed up. I forget what exactly ended up happening with the first guy (I have a great memory for quirks of language, but am awful with details of stories), but I think he lied to her and then left her for his ex-girlfriend or something like that. She liked him a lot, then it turned out he was a jerk. But now she and Sean have been together for years, and he asked her to marry him, and she asked me what I was doing in July because it will be a summer wedding. And I'm glad she will have someone to take care of her forever now, not that I really know anything about Sean except that she loves him, but it's nice to know he's there. Nice for me to know, I mean.
And there's one other day that I really remember vividly, which was at the big school picnic at the beginning of June when she took me aside and we sat in the grass and sunlight and I watched some guys throw a football while she told me about her dad having been arrested and now going to jail for attempted murder because he tried to kill a guy that was having an affair with her mom. I'm not sure all of that's true; the details of the story have (again) faded quickly for me. I just remember that every time she saw him or talked to him in prison, she acted less and less affected by it, and each time seemed worse and worse to me. "You must be getting old. Are you fourteen now?" "I'm sixteen, dad." And the one time she and I talked about drinking in college she said she knew she had a problem when she wanted to drink to stop thinking about her dad. (Here I am distorting facts a little, to suit my own whims. Nowhere else in this piece have I done this.)
She was back in Oakland for a few days recently, and we spent an evening together with Italian food and walks on the harbor. We talked for hours, and I thought about how wonderful a person she was, and how close we could be, and should be, and how foolish I was not to keep up with her better. And I am now induced to think about that in terms of many people in my life. There are an absurd number of people who I would call Good Souls who surround me: people who appreciate me when all I want to do is tell them how neat I think they are, and who are fun and smart and funny and caring, and who feel the same way about me. And I look around me and I think "I am blessed" in the most literal way I am capable of thinking about it, and I slap myself in the head for not being better about being close to these people. And I look to my close friends, and know I haven't done enough to be close to them, and I ask "Jarrod, what are you doing?" And in all honesty, I don't have a fucking clue. I have a feeling Jennifer could help me figure it out, if I ever asked her. (Not that I will.)
So we are at the ice-rink together, and after a long evening of being distracted and a long month of being infatuated, I finally go up to her and say, "I love you." "What?" she says loudly, over the disco music. "I love you," I say again, after a pause. And she looks at me with (comparatively) infinite wisdom and caring and understanding, and says, "I think... I think I'm almost ready to say the same thing to you." I didn't know how to react when she said that; I think I took it as a good sign. And then we went and skated around the rink in the light of the discoball and the cheesy music (though she didn't skate because her ankle was too messed up; she just came to hang out with everyone). Today I find it amusing that I knew (or thought I knew) that I loved her and she was still figuring it out - I never figure anything out first. I've loved a lot of people since then, most of whom I can still say I love. I tend to throw my love around like it was free to give away. Some of my friends used to say that I love in boxes; my feelings of love for one person don't affect my feelings of love for another. Which is true, somewhat. I have at times thought myself (believe it or not) wise and knowledgeable about love. Don't worry, I don't think that any more; I just feel lucky to get some love when it comes along.
One thing I have noticed is the way your mouth moves when you say the word "love." Your mouth starts almost closed, and ends that way too, but is almost wide open in the middle. (Try it right now, you'll see.) In other words, the word love is in a way circular. You could loop a video of someone saying it, or play it backwards, and it would look more or less the same. Which is the only aspect of love about which I feel more or less certain. It only happens once, and it happens over and over and over again, in many relationships, in one relationship (or in none), it keeps going and going and going and the love never stops. She was my first love, and I would only ever stop loving her if I ever stopped saying the word.