I found out through email.

The subject line read: “Won’t you please pray for our friend Sam?” I opened the email and read and then nearly fell to my knees.

A near stranger to me now but once he was my sweetheart-- my high school sweetheart-- and my first love. We met during Senior year. He was in the marching band and I was on the kick line so we shared the football field but didn‘t know of each other‘s existence until we were both cast in the Senior Play. He was tall and lanky with spiky hair and had a slightly off-center front tooth that gave him the most adorable little lisp. I thought he hung the moon.

I remember our first moment -- the first moment when we both realized that we felt something more than friendship for each other. It was just after the last performance of the play and we were rapidly dismantling the stage. Sam’s older brother had come home from college to surprise him and I saw him peering around the stage apron, looking for him. I went backstage to fetch Sam, who was busy taking off his stage makeup and I grabbed his hand to lead him through the maze of cables and scenery to the place where his big brother was waiting. The moment I grabbed his hand he squeezed mine and in that tiny moment there was everything. Everything that we would be to each other, everything that we would feel and everything that we would become was cupped in our palms at that moment.

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I nursed him through an S.A.T. induced near nervous breakdown. He taught me to drive a stick. We grew closer slowly, in stages. We had both been in minor, short-term relationships before, but they were nothing like this. We learned how to kiss together. I mean really kiss. We would sit on the couch at my parents house, watching videos and then kissing with the sound turned down. We kissed until the sweet plum flesh of our lips was raw and our heads dizzy and flooded with hormones. Fully clothed and afraid to go any further, we pressed our bodies together for hours; finding the ways that they fit, writhing in an exquisitely painful embrace. We did that for months.

We held hands as we walked down the hall-- terrific grins on our faces. We couldn’t conceal it if we’d wanted to. We were witnesses to each other’s awakening. We were breaking into blossom, coming alive. I had the sense that I was unfolding somehow, that I was opening up in a very new way and that this opening would be so good, so fulfilling and endlessly deep.

We graduated from high school on my 18^th birthday and he gave me a promise ring adorned with a microscopic sliver of a diamond. In my yearbook he wrote, “ I’m yours forever. I need you, I want you, I love you sooooooo much.” In his I wrote: “We will be so good together. We belong to each other.“

We were kids and we didn’t know what real love was but we were addicted to each other like cough syrup and we didn’t care how drippy we got.

But he was going to school in Michigan and I was staying here. Our tenuous plans for holiday meet-ups were dashed when his parents moved to Florida. We no longer had a state in common and it tore us apart. It was all over but for the crying by the time we left for school.

Today, a picture of Sam rests on my altar. He’s right there, in between Ganesh, the remover of obstacles and the little angel carved out of balsa wood. That is where I kneel to pray.

Sam: 

Today it is Valentine’s Day and here I sit at my computer, alone but well and you are so very sick, but surrounded by the ones you love. To say that the whole thing is colossally unfair is a gross understatement and I would carry this burden for you if I could. But since I can’t I’ll bless you instead.

Bless you, Sam, for being my first, though today may be your last. Thank you for being my first sweetheart, my first love; for giving me such tender memories which only grow sweeter with time.