Romancing the Stoned

I was reading a post yesterday: Calling People Names - "Her First Love" and it got me thinking...was I that naive, that careless with my own heart back then?  The answer to that is a definitive...YES.  That post was a real and gritty story of the abusing of a young heart.  This is so much less than that but it is mine to tell.

I believed in the idea of love as all-consuming, all-powerful, and beyond my control.  My heart was untried and fearless.  It beat strongly and purely, having yet to endure a single romantic scar.  I could feel it's need to love and oddly, it's need to suffer.  (A little trip to the therapist might be in order as a result of my little retrospective.)  It was a constant demand echoing within me and all around me.  I was a fourteen year old girl.  I was supposed to have a steady boyfriend.  I was supposed to argue with my parents about him and stand up for true love against all odds...right?

Not surprisingly, I soon found a boy that stirred my heart and captured my imagination.  He was sixteen and his parents never seemed to be around.  I met him at the park with one of my friends and a couple of his.  We ended up at his house. 

He kept an electric guitar slung over his shoulder and he liked to paint in abstract bursts of color all over his walls and ceiling.  He barely spoke and when he did, it was comprised of maybe two to three words, never a complete sentence.  He was always focused on something else.  Something none of us could see but him.  Needless to say, my fourteen year old heart trembled before him.

He was the most tragically romantic creature I had ever laid eyes on in real life.  He would look at me with his flashing dark eyes from behind his long black hair and I would freeze in place.  Each time he took my hand or kissed my lips, I would imagine myself more alive, more real, as if I had been in a holding pattern waiting for his touch.

It was wonderful.  It was tedious.

We never talked.  As I mentioned before, he rarely said anything at all.  He wasn't interested in hanging out with friends, double-dating, going to the movies.  He wasn't really interested in anything.  The only time we saw each other was when I went to his house or met him at the park.  What had seemed so darkly mysterious was starting to become just a pain in the ass.  But I was young and he was my pain in the ass.  Plus, love was all about torment and tragedy.  I mean, look at Romeo and Juliet.  Look at Luke and Laura. (Many of you may not get that reference, which not only reveals my age but the fact that I used to watch General Hospital.)

I proudly wore my suffering like a badge of honor.  I was the envy of my friends.  Mostly due to the wonderfully imaginative details of our "secret trysts" that I would dole out to them the way my mom used to hand out Popsicles to us on a hot summer day.

Eventually, our love just fizzled out.  There was no big break up.  No tears.  Just a loss of interest on my part.  I don't imagine his interest was ever truly piqued in the first place.  I was the one trying to win his attention, he already had mine.  It just got boring after a while and there were just so many other boys around.  So I moved on to the next boy and to tell you the truth, I'm not sure he ever even knew I was gone.

A couple years later, I ran into him and realized that the dreamy look in his eye was definitely the glassy-eyed stare of a major drug addict-not the dark glimpses of a tortured and talented soul.  I also realized that my romantic devotion to him was a lot like my maternal devotion to my first baby doll.  A relationship with a lot of posturing and imagination but in reality, just a game.

In the end, the experience taught me nothing about life, love or relationships... 

It did however, teach me about french kisses and hickeys, so I guess it had it's uses after all.