When I was a senior in high school I fell in love for the first time--truly, madly, deeply in love--with a boy named Chris. We met in Florida on Captiva Island where we were both spending our spring break. I was there with three friends from my hometown in the Midwest, and he was there with three friends from his hometown on the East Coast. Here's how we met:
My friend Denise was driving us to this restaurant called "The Mucky Duck." You had to drive really slow through the resort--like 25 mph--and stop every few feet at a stubby little stop sign. We pulled up to one of these stop signs in our big white rental van and there were these four boys waiting for a shuttle bus. My friend Beth rolled down the window and told them to get in. The side door of the van slide open and my eyes fell immediately on the red-headed boy among them.
It was like a cliche--I stopped seeing everyone else around me; I didn't even look to see if the other boys were cute; I just locked eyes with this boy and I swear I fell right in love and never stopped. We spent that night talking, and the rest of the trip walking on the beach and kissing and giving each other little mementos--
his Madras plaid wallet (he was preppy), my class ring (if you're out there Chris, my mom wants you to give it back). Then, we went back to our cold winter worlds, thousands of miles apart.
We talked on the phone and wrote each other letters all the time--we didn't have email or IM, so we had to wait for snail mail. Chris was a great writer so his letters were sort of like poems. He used words I'd never heard before--like "myriad" to describe all the red taillights of the cars on the highway. He loved REM, so we would listen to them on the phone and try to figure out the lyrics, which was NOT easy. He loved F. Scott Fitzgerald, so I read everything Fitzgerald ever wrote. But mostly I just pined away for Chris.
