In celebration of Valentine’s Day and my 10 year wedding anniversary, I am sharing a series of posts that I wrote several years ago chronicling our love story. The first post is here
A row of bright blue lockers outside of our psychology teacher’s classroom is where everything happened that year.
Each of us had our own locker but because we were highly logical high-school seniors, we decided that the five of us girls should all share one single, tiny, half locker between us. Clearly our years of education had paid off and we were capable of making well thought out life decisions.
Eventually the locker became The Meeting Place, thanks to its prime location at the front of the school, and before long the boys in our circle had the combination and were crowding us between classes. We passed notes through shared textbooks and scrawled silly messages on the small, magnetic whiteboard inside until the bell rang and sent us scattering to class.
The lockers are how I found out he was taking her to prom. It was basically the early aughts version of a group text, a scribbled list on a scrap of paper tucked in a psychology book, all of us filling in the names of our dates to save space in the rented limo as we passed the book from one to the other.
He didn’t share our ritual, our books, our locker. I knew he hadn’t written it but it was there on the page anyhow, in a round script that matched the excitement of senior prom planning.
The space next to my name stayed blank.
I didn’t go to prom that year.
My best friend won prom queen and I perched her tiara over my ponytail as we packed that summer, preparing to move away together for college in the fall.
(My slightly sour feelings about that particular prom could not outweigh the fact that I, like Princess Kate, am a girl who appreciates a good tiara.)
My group of friends paired off suddenly right after graduation. I scribbled a note in J’s yearbook that I thought he should marry me and pretended it was a joke.
(Spoiler alert: it was not a joke.)
It felt so big back then, all of the changes. Leaving the safety of our hometown, facing the unknown of college, and the tension of moving from being a close circle of friends to coupling up.
College was not what I expected. A tiny Baptist school with curfews, clubs with cafeteria hierarchies, and tough classes felt all at once exciting and overwhelming.
My roommate’s boyfriend drove up to visit most weekends and J would tag along with him, keeping me company while our friends went out on their dates. He would bring his guitar and teach me chords, hands over mine until we were forced by the late hour and rules about “no boys in the dorm” to retreat to the common areas.
We would walk and talk and play ping-pong in the student center while we waited on our friends to return. I got very good at ping-pong.
He was my best friend.
This time when I wrote in my journal about J, I asked God to take away my feelings for him, please and thank you.
I dated other guys. Guys I liked almost as well as J. Guys who would quietly ask me in the car after meeting him what was going on between the two of us.
“Nothing,” I would reply with a slight ache in my chest at the almost-lie, “we’re just really good friends.”
And we were.
Until someone told him that my yearbook note about marriage wasn’t a joke at all.
And then suddenly, we weren’t friends anymore.
{to be continued}
