Day o2 - Your first love
So obviously it’s not the next day, but I can’t get to sleep. Anyway, I don’t think I’ve really had a crazy love or anything like that. As I said before, I haven’t ever dated anyone and that isn’t looking like it will change any time soon, but I guess if I wanted to talk about the person I’ve had the most intense feelings for, I would be lying if I said it was anyone other than Dustin. In fact, I just wrote something about him a few entries back.
I met him in a friend’s garage back in grade 12. He was in grade 10 at the time. Tall and scrawny with a bad haircut and ill-fitting clothes. We sat in folding chairs and he drank beer from a guitar case that doubled as a cooler. We talked about what happens when we die. Shit you think is really profound in high school. After that night we talked to each other a lot and often saw one another at parties but it was always strictly platonic. We have been friends for over four years and have only hung out alone twice that I can recall. I always loved the things he did: freestyle rapping on trampolines, puns, reading atlases at house parties, downloading DOOM onto my computer. All these silly little things. That summer I moved away to Nanaimo and my friend let me know that Dustin had liked me the entire time, and that threw me for a loop, because 1) nobody had ever said they liked me prior to that and 2) I felt the same way. So, I was about 1500 km away and nothing ever happened with it. One night after reading a particularly frustrating horoscope I consulted my friend Neil and with blessing I wrote Dustin a letter, but knowing I’d never mail it I emailed it to him instead. It was neutrally received. We continued talking. A year or so later he got drunk and confessed that he liked me, but backpedalled the next day, and the cycle continued. We saw each other a few times, and it was always nice but wholly unsatisfying.
It’s basically been the same since the start - long periods of no talking, then a burst of intense conversation and warm feelings, then a cool-down where he goes crazy and is unintentionally hurtful and it repeats itself. He has some sort of mental illness and is hard to deal with but I do try my best. It came to a real climax this past spring when he dropped the L-bomb on me repeatedly but by that point I didn’t want to hear it anymore. Our relationship is really complicated and it’s one of those things I can’t tell my friends about because they think I’m completely ridiculous, but that’s it. I think if I had to select someone as being my first “love”, it would be him. I still think about him all the time, but it’s not like it used to be. And I’m sort of grateful for that.
