August is a shitshow. This has been my mantra for the last two weeks, and I thank my mother-in-law for these words. My mother-in -law lives across the street from us, and sometimes I feel guilty talking to friends with in-law problems because mine are the best. My oldest child started first grade two weeks ago. He goes to an extended year school, and they always start early. The last 2 weeks have been so tumultuous, both my 6-year-old and 4-year-old have been prone to meltdowns. Everything feels so fraught and on edge. I stopped sleeping normally. Like literally I went from sleeping 8 hours the last week of July to averaging 5 the last few weeks. August has always been a transitional time, but for some reason everything feels more heightened this year.
10 years ago this week I moved in with my husband. He had a house where he had lived with his brothers, and his youngest brother was still there at the time. My twin sister, who was my roommate since summer 2011, got married in August 2013. I took the bar exam for the first time in July 2013, literally the Tuesday and Wednesday before my sister got married that Saturday. The night of my law school graduation in May I called my now husband Nemat and told him I wanted to move in with him. This is a pattern in our relationship where I ask directly for what I want, I had no job prospects post-graduation and I had already been staying at his house for 5 nights a week throughout the year. My sister had moved in with her fiancé over the summer and she would only come back to our apartment once a week. I remember the first night when I moved in thinking, “I really did this, I am actually choosing to share space with this man, potentially forever.” My parents were concerned, I grew up in a conservative denomination the ARP church. They wanted to make sure we were talking about marriage; they were scared I would have nowhere to go if we broke up even though we had never given any signs of breaking up to them in the 2 years we had been dating. Unknown to me, my husband was already searching for engagement rings the summer I moved in with him. We got engaged on my birthday in November. As I was thinking about this anniversary of living in my house, my mind cycled back to August 2010. When I first moved to Greensboro, NC, I was heartbroken over the boy I first loved when I was 14.
I have always had an impeccable memory. I remember specific conversations verbatim and the scenes play in my head like a film. When a memory is triggered, so many more scenes will come flooding back. I now practice law with my dad who has been an attorney for over 30 years. He took the bar exam with me in February 2014 to become licensed in NC because SC doesn’t offer any reciprocity. My parents moved to my city in September 2021, and they brought old journals from the house where we had lived since I was 6 years old. We have built-in book shelves on a whole wall of my kids’ room, and my journals have stayed there untouched for almost two years. My 6 year old is a new reader and growing stronger every day. He picked up my journal from 8th and 9th grade, age 14-15 this week. He wanted to read it. So I was forced to read it before I let him read any of it. And in this journal was a specific story I had not thought about in over 10 years.
When I was 14 years old, I went to Europe with my Latin teacher for 2 weeks in the summer. I had just finished 8th grade, but 9th graders were also invited on this trip despite having already graduated from middle school. Back in 2002, we used a calling card to check in with our parents from England, there was no social media, there was no checking email on your phone.
The day before I went to Europe I decided to take charge of my romantic life. There was a boy named Ben who had “dated” one of my good friends in 6th grade for a few months. I don’t recall why they broke up or if I had checked in with her lately regarding her feelings for him, but in the summer of 2002 I decided I needed to confess I loved him. And I was going to do it in an email, because he would read it and I wouldn’t be able to see if he responded. But I also decided I needed to send an email to another boy named Jason. Jason was about 8 months older than me; he was a year ahead of me in school, and he had already finished 9th grade.
Jason and I met through band when I was in 7th grade. The 7th and 8th grade bands combined for Festival Band, and both of us played the trumpet. We ended up being the only people to try out for All State band that year. The first memory I have of him talking to me was him handing off the music book we had to share at our auditions and telling me good luck. We used to talk on AIM all the time, and Ben had told me Jason said I was beautiful, more beautiful than the girl Ben liked at the time. I wanted Jason to date me, but at this point it was the summer before he was starting 9th grade, and he said he didn’t want to date when we went to separate schools. He tried to get me to join marching band as an 8th grade, but I had drama camp during band camp and I only saw him once during that school year at the fair. He sent me music from the flip folder and his JV Basketball picture in the mail. In the summer of 2002, I decided I would email him, and I told him I was angry with him for not wanting to date me. I knew he liked me, and I didn’t understand why he didn’t want to be with me. The night I wrote these emails, I couldn’t save the drafts to send later. It felt like a sign I had to send them right then.
The context of my school district is important here. I went to school in Columbia, SC and both my middle school and high school were majority Black high schools. They had magnet programs within the schools, and I was in the gifted programs. Jason was one of 5 Black guys in the Horizon magnet program. I am a white woman. I didn’t particularly set out to be in an interracial relationship, but Jason was the first person in my life to have seemed mutually interested in me. He was the first person to tell me I was beautiful and talented, and it encouraged my feelings to grow throughout the year, even when we were mostly only communicating online.
In Europe I stayed in a room with a mutual friend of Jason’s named Dione, another student who had recently completed 9th grade. She knew I was interested in him and asked me if was going to try to date him that coming school year now that we would be at the same school. I said yes, but I had no idea for how I was going to accomplish this goal.
We get back from Europe, and Ben turns on me because I changed our relationship by saying I loved him. I was a straight size teenager but in the parlance of my high school “thick,” and he would talk about how fat I was to his friends and question why anyone would want to date me. My friends stood up for me at several parties and movie theaters when this drama was happening. The minute he said he wasn’t interested, I was over him, but I was hurt by his words. I didn’t see him again once high school started except at the Homecoming football game.
Jason and I did end up dating, albeit extremely briefly, as far as us being officially boyfriend and girlfriend. In the journal entry seen here I found the date of the beginning of our official couple status- September 27, 2002. He had liked another white girl in his year, and apparently friends of his had told him he should go for me instead when she was not interested. They had sat together on the Atlanta school trip and he was blown away by her uniqueness, she did Irish dance and spoke in metaphors. I have never been more confused than the time she talked to me on AIM about a rock being angry with a wave crashing on it when I said I was angry with her for Jason still liking her.
Jason helped with Rookie Band camp in mid-July 2002. He came to help with the new members for 3 days before the returning members joined the next week, and he sat next to me in the band room every day. I spent a lot of time those first few weeks of being at the same school feeling exhilarated at every after school marching band practice, and then he started writing me notes. The day he asked me to be his girlfriend he wrote a note that said I was cute as hell, and he had decided he was going to be happy with me even if he was still hurting over someone else. I cried at Singing in the Rain musical performed at our local theater because I realized how much he still loved her, and I thought our relationship was going to be over before it started. He called me to talk on that Sunday night, and left a message on my answering machine. I had been visiting my great grandma at her nursing home and I didn’t get home in time to call back under my parents’ “No calls after 9 pm” rule.
The week Jason and I were together was Spirit Week, and the homecoming game was Thursday because we only had one stadium in our district. Throughout the week, we had a hard time navigating how we should act as a “couple,” we already had established lunch areas, and he mostly came over to my friends for 10-15 minutes during the lunch period. On the day of the homecoming football game he broke up with me. It will never make sense to me as far as the given reason. We were in the trumpet section together walking to the pep rally, and I was talking to my friend Julian (4 years later I learned Julian had his first boyfriend in freshman year of college). Jason got jealous I was talking closely and laughing with another guy and walked quickly away from me. I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him, and he tossed it off. I fell down,scraped my hand and smashed the bell of my trumpet up into itself on the sidewalk next to the gym. Ms. Lucas, my 9th grade English teacher saw me visibly upset and holding my hand when I got to class. She was concerned; we had a test on Oedipus that day and it was hard to write with my hand scraped up. She was the Horizon English teacher and she somehow knew I was dating her former student Jason (probably because I used to do things like write Elizabeth loves Jason on my notebooks and she had eyes and could see it when walking around the class). After English class was lunch period, and he broke up with me in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by people. I wanted to hide in the bathroom, and our outdoor bathrooms were always locked due to the administration trying to stop smoking. There was a group of young black women who came up to me, they were not my friends but they asked why I was crying. They all cornered him; it was a weird scene. My friend Dione told me I had to get it together, and I shouldn’t be crying in public. Of course I still had to go to the Homecoming game to perform with the marching band that night.
My mom picked my twin sister and me up after school, and she asked about our day. I snapped at her, “It was awful, Jason broke up with me and my trumpet is smashed, isn’t that enough to have a terrible day?” She gave me space to cry in my room alone after school, but we only had about 2.5 hours until it was time to ride the bus to the football stadium. The night was awful, I felt like I would burst into tears at any moment, and there was nowhere to be alone at a football game.
And then my memory shuts down for a couple days. I know we had a band competition that weekend and Jason said we could be friends with benefits. We hadn’t even kissed or barely touched at this point. I think we held hands a few times at lunch. We were fighting during warm ups in a field next to the competition field, and he looked enraged while I yelled at him. Our section was surrounding us, and our section leader told us we couldn’t have any more Saturday night fights. On Monday I recall us talking to our leader again and saying it wouldn’t be a problem. We were going to get past our non-relationship, and we would not hurt the section.
That was the end of me being with Jason officially. Except of course it wasn’t actually the end. For all of freshman year I wanted nothing more than to be with him, I could not be dissuaded from the idea we were meant to be together. I knew he still liked me, he had multiple conversations with my friends about being conflicted over his feelings for me and another 9th grade black girl in the PCA Dance program. The last entry in my 9th grade journal is New Years Eve. I wrote a poem called Shades of Gray. And it was about the football game and me driving home looking at our hands on the band bus and thinking, “Damn the contrast between our skin color is beautiful in the moonlight.” I felt like no one understood me or understood why I fell in love with this person.
This week my 6 year old asked me why I stopped writing. We read the last few entries together, he wanted to know what happened to Jason. I said, “I married Daddy, Jason is a doctor at Duke, what else do you need to know?” He said, “Well did you ever get back together?” And what’s the answer? No not officially. He never again told me he wanted me to be his girlfriend. But I still loved him for years. He was still the person I loved through all of high school and college. He was still my prom date when he came back from college, still the person I called every week when he moved to Greenville to go to college. He was still the only person who made me feel like I couldn’t breathe when he visited during my senior year of high school. He was the main person in my mind for every song I ever heard for the next 8 years.
The only time Jason and I ever came close to being together was my senior year at Duke followed by the summer of 2010 when we were both living in Columbia before he started med school and I started law school 5 hours apart. He was in Columbia the whole year working in a health clinic before he got accepted to med school. I failed the relationship test Valentine’s Day weekend of my senior year because my friends weren’t friendly enough to make him feel like he fit into my world. The most unfair message I ever got from him was when he said he had feelings for me and he could see us together, even in marriage, til death do us part. But he felt embarrassed my friends didn’t like him, frankly because they had heard too much about high school. The “even in marriage, til death do us part” phrase went through my head hundreds of times that week. Our communication went to only occasional updates on my law school acceptances. I told him when I chose to go to Elon Law because they gave me a free tuition scholarship. Over the summer I knew we were back in Columbia together, and after a month of almost no contact I texted him and he took me out for drinks. We went to the movies, we spent time together at my house, and I told him how much I had always loved him. He said he loved me too, but he still didn’t think we were the right fit. The last question I ever asked him in person was, “Do you ever think this is going to happen for us?” He said he didn’t know. That was August 2010 and I moved to Greensboro the day after that conversation to attend law school. I met my now husband 2 weeks before finals started in my 1L year. I went on a few dates in the spring of my 1L year, but nothing was longer term than a few weeks before I started dating Nemat in summer 2011.
Jason was my first love. He will always be my first love. I will always think of him when someone mentions the concept of first love. When I started dating my husband, I spent a lot of time trying to pretend I never loved anyone before him. If it wasn’t forever, it wasn’t love. If I didn’t feel secure, it wasn’t love. Nemat and I are right together, Jason and I were never going to be right. I talked to my husband about all these thoughts this week. It felt like a betrayal to be sucked back into the emotional vortex of being 14 again and then by extension into being 22 again. I never expected a journal I wrote 21 years ago to emotionally affect me. I haven’t thought about Jason in more than passing terms since the fall after I moved to Greensboro. It quickly became clear he wasn’t going to keep in touch, and he was making a clean break. I found the actual love of my life 12 years ago, and I married into his wonderful family. What answers do I have for my 6-year-old? My only conclusion was all I ever wanted was to matter to Jason. I wrote him several times to say he didn’t give a shit about me, and it always made him angry. I knew even then it was unfair of me to say those words, I knew he cared about me, but I wanted him to tell me how wrong I was. He never cared about me in the same way, he never made me feel loved. Any time we had feelings for each other they weren’t communicated clearly.
I had a dream last night. My grandma’s birthday is next week, and she will be 85. Jason referred to her as my nice grandma because we ran into him at the mall once during freshman year of high school, and she was very pleasant to him when she met him for the first time. She always asked about him, and she was excited when he took me to prom. In my dream, I was at her funeral, and he shows up and says I always liked your grandma. And I say, “I know, she always liked you too.” I ask, “Did you ever love me?” I woke up without the answer.
Sissy- I love this obviously because it feels so real and genuine and sounds like how we talk!