There was the boy I could have loved had he spoken more than one word to me. Perhaps I liked him so much, because he looked like me to the point where sometimes people couldn't tell us apart in shitty photographs. If he was juggling, they knew it was him. He wore a great black duster coat in all kinds of weather and was always juggling. He never spoke, only smiled acknowledgment. We were mere spectators in his world. I could never rise to the stage he was on. He was the boy I fantasized about, the unattainable juggler. After all these years, he still juggles, but has lost the duster coat and his hair has turned brown like mine. He was merely an archetype in my teenage universe, a point of fantastical reference. It would have surely spoiled my dreams had he spoken.

There were others I loved more closely in high school, the literary pothead, who loved Tennessee Williams, a boy with long soft blond baby hair and a doughy figure like a middle-aged man's. I loved his tender smooth belly. Once when we were cuddled together on a chair watching a movie, I felt our souls enmesh, expanding beyond our selves, two differently tinted bubbles sharing air. He was the first boy I'd ever kissed and he had put his fingers to my lips first to get to know “their contours.” The kiss happened in the evening on the old Quaker Meeting House steps, the antique windows bubbled in the lamp glow. It was a perfect first kiss. Many that came after were not good at all and he and I had gotten that kiss just right. I was fourteen and he was sixteen and, of course, that meant we were as doomed as we should have been. Even though I fooled around behind his back and he behind my back, it still stung keenly when he dumped me.  I cried for a night and got over the romance in the space of a girl-friend loving week. He began to smoke a lot more pot.  His eyes lost their luster and he was gone to somewhere I could not follow as a friend.

There were some other guys and thoughts at having affairs with some willing girls, but they didn't matter as much as the one who walked into my life when I was sixteen. He was the kayak-maker, who was ugly in a beautiful sort of way, in a Leonard Cohen sort of absolutely charming way. He reminded me of swamp creatures and the good things that spring out of the muck. His father was having an affair with one of the teachers at our school. He didn't want to be like his roving father. This was the first boy I had sex with. It was a fumbling, dumb bovine experience in the woods, too close to the school for comfort. He felt guilty. I didn't. I loved him. He didn't love me. I cried a lot when we broke up and couldn't sleep for days. He wanted to be friends, but I couldn't let him go.  He and his family left the following year, so I never had the chance to get over him and be his friend.

I did meet the man I married in my high school senior year, a dorky tall boy with a white man's afro, a brilliant boy who had been to several high-schools and been hounded out of each one by poor grades.  This was his last-chance stop in order to make the grades for college. He talked incessantly, save when he was playing music. The music drew me in and the fact that he talked about brilliant things like science, computers and literature. He talked to anyone who would listen and I taught him social skills, especially how to listen. We didn't marry until eight years after graduation. He drove me crazy then and he still does now. We dated lots of other people and stayed fast friends, despite one very ugly breakup. I dated some lovely women and men, but none of the romances ever lasted. It was he who never let me go as a friend throughout all these years. It was he who was always there no matter what the problem was. When we got back together, we lived in his grandfather's house. That man taught us what a good marriage is, teaching us selfish young adults the art of compromise. We owe it to granddad that after all these years of friendship, dating and marriage, we are still together. Compromise isn't always easy and we do have nasty fights, but we never go to bed angry and all the make-up sex is terrific.  There may be lots of fish in the sea as the old saying goes, but there is only one right one for me. 

lots of fish- by Lucy Simpson