Boy Seventeen

All my life I wanted to be in love and what in love meant was safe/obsessed/purified/worshiped/destined and the turning of those as well. Seventeen I fell in love and I was safe/obsessed/purified/worshiped/destined to be in love with this seventeen year old blonde haired long haired blue eyed tight jean wearing metal music loving guitar playing miserable abused reduced shadow boy, because he understood The Thing I Could Not Name and because he grew up with and lived inside The Thing I Could Not Name _ and then because I spent my entire life trying to name it _ we fell apart. Because he would not have it named and he would not hear it named and because I insisted on doing so. Because we were in love at the beginning but too damaged to care for it. Because love turned into sickly need so quickly it left me breathless and gutless. Because I still believed life was possible and he did not. We parted, we reunited, we parted again. We tore each other up and stitched each other back together. This boy was Mr. Curry's best friend. Mr. Curry was my best friend. We slept on each other's backs, curled and sweaty and horny and myself lit with a passionate fire for an intellectual and ethical life that was completely and totally out of my reach but not. out. of my dreams. When I think to myself, or let's say someone asked me - Why Mr. Curry and not Boy Seventeen? I know it is for many reasons and for one reason. The one reason sounds like this: Mr. Curry turning the pages of a book. It looks like this: Mr. Curry's eyes meeting and holding my own ( he is not afraid of this and men are often afraid of this or worse they act like they are not afraid by meeting eyes with a false bravado and false masculinity they translate into aggression ). It tastes like this: secret things. It feels like this: Mr. Curry picking me up off the bathroom floor, blood pooling between my legs, and carrying me to the car so I don't deliver our baby on the floor.

What love is and is not fascinates me. I loved Boy Seventeen and he loved me. Yes. Because we were too sick and too sad and ultimately too different to meet in the broken places where the light comes through, we were not meant to be, and because we had any sense, we let go. Because Mr. Curry and I are sick, sad, and smart and brave and ultimately hopeful, we meet in the places where the light gets through, and this is where we hold on, peering through the fog. Boy Seventeen is now a man in his thirties with a beer belly and just out of a long term relationship with a woman ten years or so older than him whom he never married but lived with. Boy Seventeen lost his mother to suicide or overdose when we were- Seventeen- He lost his dad a few years ago in his late 20's to lymphoma. He was an abused child and he has not made shore. Boy Seventeen once helped Mr. Curry clean my car after we had been married a short time, and Mr. Curry says Boy Seventeen sat in my car, rubbing a towel on the wheel, and stopped for a moment, still, before saying sadly ' This car smells like Maggie's perfume '. And I thought to myself when I heard that, we Loved. It was something easily dismissed because we were teenagers and fucked up and broken and all broken things can be easily dismissed by the rest of the world. I don't dismiss or erase it. He was the only other man I've loved. Mr. Curry loved him too. We hope he makes shore.

Mr. Curry has been my best friend turned into my lover turned into my husband turned into my Love. What I thought love was is so much less than what it is.