He was the second boy I kissed. I kissed him in the back of a car when I was fifteen and his mouth tasted like bubble gum. Just thinking of it gives me that first kiss feeling that I stopped being able to get through kisses. It turned in to the getting felt up feeling and then the getting felt down feeling. Then it turned into the sex feeling and then it stopped being a feeling at all.
Afterward he wanted to be my boyfriend. He wanted to carry my books and talk to me in school, but I was not ready for him. I was in National Honor Society and had all my theatre and choir friends. I may have been a geeke, but he was a loser. He smoked pot and yelled out "penis" in the lunch room.
I like him though. He wore faded jeans that he had drawn tiny sperm all over with marker and took art and study hall (only losers take study hall!). He had this huge white boy fro and sometimes he straightened and slicked it back. When he did this I referred to him as "Crisco" to all my nerdy theatre friends. Despite my making fun of him I wanted to be like him and probably be with him. I spent hours after school painting sets in an effort to kiss the aspiring director turned suburban English teacher's butt in an effort to one day actually get the lead in the musical. Ryan didn't kiss anyone's butt, except maybe mine. He did not do things having only ulterior motives. He was pure. My senior year I started having the slow realization I would never by the star of the play. I would never be a laughing happy high school girl going to the mall with her friends, and I would never be courted by the college bound theatre boy (mainly because they were all queer). I would have periods of weeks or months where I wrote in my journal three times a day and dressed grunge. Sometimes I would put little braids in the front of my hair with beads at the end. Ryan stopped me in the hall and told my he liked my hair that way.
I never got the lead in my musical and I went to my prom with some doofis I didn't like. He was stupid. Then I went away to college and became what I wanted to be. I became like Ryan and found a boyfriend like Ryan. I majored in classical voice, but I was not like most of the sweet choir girls in my department. My boyfriend was a C student who ultimately flunked out after three semesters (we broke up the middle of second semester) . We were drunk together constantly. I learned to play guitar and and wrote horrible poetry that I recited at the local poetry slam. The end of that relationship led to pot and more of the bad boys I had yearned for in high school and had been afraid of. I did not come back to my high school town until the summer after my sophemore year, when I was 20.
I wanted some pot, and as I had been Miss Mary Sunshine (with an inner darkness waiting to come out and dance a wicked tango), I had no idea who I could get it from - except Ryan. I called him and we smoked up a bunch of times that summer. He told me that the first time I called him he was afraid I was a narc. We had some debaucherous moments that summer, but I never entertained the idea of having him as a boyfriend. He was a drug dealer and worked at the gas station. I was extremely depressed that summer and all my memories from those three months are foggy. What we had wasn't pure because neither of us was in a place of mental purity or good intentions. (As a side note, I stopped smoking pot long ago because people who are already paranoid, anxious, afraid of being eaten by the couch and riddled with guilt for having the occasional unproductive day should really not be smoking weed.),
After I graduated from college I was reunited with one of the now out of the closet theatre guys from high school whom I had intentionally lost touch with. We got an apartment together in Berwyn, a suburb just outside of Chicago. One day I was walking down the street and I heard a guy yell my name out of a car window. The car pulled over. Ryan was one of the passengers in the car. He lived in a nearby suburb, Stickney (which people called Stinky because the sewage sanatation plant was located there, which I'm sure made for cheap rent). He clearly wasn't in good shape. I could tell the drug dealing wasn't just a brief stop on his career ladder. Just as I was this Bohemian in high school, hiding under a preppy girl mask, I was now and will always be this preppy judgmental girl hiding in thrift store clothes and a nose ring. We would never be compatible. I told my roomate what had happened and he said, "oh, Crisco!"
Then next year we moved into the city and a few years later I moved to the West Coast. I never saw Ryan again. The funny thing is that high school was not the first time I met him. The summer before I was in seventh grade I was sleepying over at some girls house and he was her next door neighbor. We had never gone to school together because I had just moved to to the town. The next year we still did not meet since I went to the junior high and he went to the Elementary school. He looked way younger than his age, and seem extremely sensitive, smart, and fragile. He had a pet duck that he kept in his back yard. I remember we had chemistry then, but I didn't understand what it was since I was only 12. Fate had brought us together four times in the late 80's and 90's.
Now it is easy to find people from your past. There is all this technology that has created a world where people who were supposed to stay in your past don't. Regrets about losing someone don't exist because we don't permanently lose them anymore. I have a strong enough belief in fate to believe we kept meeitng over an over for a reason, but I am not going to look for him. If we need to speak again I'm sure we will find each other in the same time and place, if not, we have learned everything we can from each other.
