A letter to a lost friend

 A letter to a lost friend

I will not say to whom I write this directly, though if you read it, you may know yourself. Probably not.

You probably won’t read it, and maybe that’s the best. If you do and you know it is about you, it may sound like a big tinfoil ball just falling into your lap, and don’t be sure to undo and see its contents or throw it in a nearby trash can. I can't make that decision for you. So I will continue.
I first met you when I was in sixth grade and I fell in love with you (just as a sixth grader loves peer - maybe you fell hard in a dream is a better definition) from about the time I saw you. And you get a lot of attention. The new boy. The best in the class. Outgoing. Charismatic.
But then he asked me to "go with you," which I did - even though it wasn't as if he had asked me to "go with you for a while." This was the people of the 80s. Yes I said yes. But that was the last word I ever spoke before you.

I begged my parents to put a phone in my room, and for some reason they did, and I spent many hours talking to you in the evening, often after I had finished my homework, often before you even finished yours. I do not remember what we talked about, but I do know that my family was very interested in my relationship with you. I had never had a boyfriend before and I was embarrassed about this. I remember my older sister trying to pick up the phone quietly so she could listen on the other side. I remember my mother scolding me, saying that this boy was not right, that he was chasing girls, and that he would drop me like a stone in a pond. His comments burned my soul - especially because he kept it right, but not for the reasons he thought.

What really happened was that every time you tried to talk to me at school, near the locks, in the restaurant, I would just die. I could not pronounce a single word. I was so depressed that I wanted to evaporate. I would not be surprised if what I did was actually a bar on the other side down the hall.
All I wanted to do was hug you, hold you, kiss you, talk to you like we did on the phone. Sex was not so much, but intimacy - the kind I had never shared with anyone and the nature of my abusive home life did not seem encouraging.

My mother was a confusing combination of carelessness and aggression, love and bitterness. You know where the ice begins to slowly turn into water (i.e. a little snow… I was just trying to avoid that challenge), and you do not know exactly when you will lose and slide down into the cold depths — after all it was like in my house shaking mom. (I could have used the cliche "to go with egg shells, but I didn't have a good reel for that.)