Long ago, I was cleaning out the rain gutter crowning my old home back in New Mexico. Because I was a teenager, I was really fucking stupid. Rather than employing a ladder or a solid surface of any kind, I chose to stand on one of those green, wide-lidded mini-dumpster things we called a herbie because beats the hell out of me. Naturally, every part of it that could collapse or roll waited just long enough for me to get comfortable before pitching me backward onto the dirt of my backyard. 

I wish I could say that I was lucky I didn’t land on concrete, but I can’t. This was desert clay, which, when dry, resembles dust-covered iron. This is the kind of firm that young concrete dreams of growing up to be. Because that didn’t suck enough, random chunks of sandstone jutted out of the surface here and there. You know, for garnish. 

And so, one moment, I was performing one of those tedious chores that are a consequence of living under your parents’ house, your parents’ rules; and the next, every single molecule of oxygen that wasn’t already tied up in hemoglobin fled my body. Blunt pain rattled my spine, and my heart stopped doing what it was it did out of confusion, as my lungs had evidently forgotten to breathe properly. I couldn’t move—less because of said pain and more because of the very tangible fear that I wouldn’t be able to. 

And that, dear readers, is exactly how I felt when I saw her picture last week. 

Her eyes were still mocha and enormous, with thick, dark lashes. Her hair was still an impossible blend of gold and platinum. And the way she smiled still inspired me to do the same. It reminded me how inhumanly gorgeous she was, making even overalls look sexy. And how she was confident enough to be visibly bored every time some boy came over to feign interest in her conversation, a fist clenched around a beer and a thumb hooked on a belt loop—yet only those who were really paying attention could make out the mournfulness hiding there. 

I remembered my reaction upon seeing her for the first time on the other side of a spirited party. (“That girl is way out of my league.”) I remembered my reaction when she waded through that crowd for the sole purpose of finding out who I was. (“Wait. Me?”) I remembered my reaction when she and her sister sought me out at a different, equally spirited party the next night. (“Seriously. Me?”) And I remembered my reaction to the fact that I had started to flirt with her. (“Okay. Clearly not me.”) 

But that’s not what knocked the wind out of me when I saw that picture last week. What did was the fact that I’d forgotten how deeply we were in love with each other. 

It’s been nearly fourteen years since I learned her name, and about thirteen since we last communicated. Over that time, I’ve convinced myself that I made all of these feelings up. We were simply two people with nothing in common, whose hunger for any kind of attention led us to comfort each other during the intense transitions we were subjecting ourselves to. Hell, we’d never even kissed; we were afraid to, because we couldn’t possibly be falling for someone we’d known for a handful of days. 

Except we were fooling ourselves. And for too long, I’ve been fooling myself. The intimacy of our letters and phone calls was real, and it was exquisite. It really was love. Eventually, I found my footing in New York City, she found her footing where she was, and we didn’t need each other anymore. 

And time passed. 

I don’t know how she remembers me. Was I a fling? An overreaction? A friend? A mistake? A pen-pal? An ex-boyfriend, even? I doubt I’ll ever know. That doesn’t matter, though, because somewhere, she is smiling. 

The events of which I speak transpired in the year of Our Lord, two thousand and four, in the final week of the eleventh month, in the city of Bloomington, Indiana. Bloomington isn’t much of a metropolis, but the vast number of students at Indiana University certainly try to make it one. The side-effect of this is the sudden decline in the town’s population during holiday breaks. 

And so, during Thanksgiving week, peace reigns. That night, so long ago, the air was brisk enough to require a light jacket, but not so cold as to prohibit cycling. The hour was late, in that I had finished a long shift at the copy shop whose name I will not mention (it rhymes with “Pinkos”), and the quiet inspired me to push my bike home and relax.  

On my right loomed the vast parking lot for the IU Stadium, on my left sat the houses unfortunate enough to be across the street from the stadium, and on my cell phone spoke the man who, unbeknownst to either of us, would one become known as “Best.”  

We’d been trading vulgar jabs, as usual, through most of the journey, until a police car whispered up behind me and continued on. Given my history, I still flinch whenever I see a representative of the law, but tonight, I tried not to show it. I don’t have a firm grasp on the statutes of limitation on said history, so it was best I not draw attention to myself.  

“Be cool,” I told my friend.  

“Why should I be cool?” he replied.  

 “Heat.”  

He laughed. “You know I’m not actually there, right?”  

“Be,” I repeated. “Cool.” 

“Okay, okay.”  

“Oh, shit,” I muttered, because even the most law-abiding of citizens tenses up when a representative of the law flashes its lights and performs an action-movie U-turn in his or her direction, which this one just did.  

It took only a second for it to occur to me that the officer in that car was not after me. It’s not like I was carrying around a trunk-load of cocaine; I didn’t even have a trunk. The inspiration for this act of vehicular drama must have been quite spectacular, and I was sorry I had to miss it. I mean, this town was dead.  

As the cruiser sped away, reflections of its lights receded behind me … except … except they weren’t actually receding. My heart leapt.  

“Okay,” I said, “I think something really entertaining is about to happen nearby.”  

“You’re going to have sex with a bunch of goat farmers?”  

 “I’ve been doing that the whole time we’ve been on the phone,” I replied as I looked over my shoulder, just in time to witness the same cruiser executing another U-turn in my direction.  

This time, it took almost three whole seconds for it to occur to me that the officer in the car was not after me, even when the siren whooped that singular whoop that heralded an upcoming punishment for a traffic violation. Because that would be ridiculous—so ridiculous in fact, that the officer had to stop his car, jump out, and trot over to my side to get my attention.  

“I’ll have to call you back,” I told my phone. “I just got pulled over.”  

“What?” he replied. “I thought you were walk—” 

I flipped the phone closed and faced the civil servant who was only a little bit out of breath. He asked, “Do you know why I stopped you?”  

There are so many things I wanted to say at this moment. The first was, “Speeding?”; the second was, “That may be the dumbest question I’ve been asked in some time.” However, the police packed pepper-spray in this town, so I went with number three: “No.”  

Before he could respond, a second cruiser came up from behind, passed by, flipped on its lights, turned with even more urgency and panache than the officer who currently held my attention, and came to a screeching halt directly in front of me. The driver swung open the door and stepped out, one boot at a time. The time of night forbade the use of the mirrored sunglasses clipped to his shirt, but in his heart, he was whipping them off with cocky menace. He swaggered up to the other cop, looked me up and down, and muttered something in his ear. Officer One muttered something back, which caused Officer Two to study me more intently.  

I would have been more self-conscious, were I not more clean-cut at that moment than I had been at any other point in my life—up to and including my First Communion twenty years before. This left my current state of being squarely between “What” and “The fuck”—so much so that I was completely numb to the third cruiser that whipped around the corner. The fact that its siren was already wailing and its lights were already strobing ferociously meant that someone had dispatched it. For me.  

The third cop’s assessment of me was much more appropriate given the situation. Frowning, he muttered to the other two, and they muttered right back.  

After some intense chatter, Officer One stepped away from the group and asked me, “Do you have any idea—” 

“No,” I replied. 

“Well,” he explained, “this time of year, there is a rash of bike thefts while all the students are on vacation.”  

Officer Two watched my reaction before adding, “And walkin’ on the side of the road like that, you look awful suspicious.”  

“Can we see your ID?” asked Officer One. I complied, and he took it back to his car for further scrutiny.  

Officer Two folded his arms. “That really yours?”  

“Yes, it is.”  

“Prove it.”  

This was a challenge, inasmuch as there was no registration I could pull out of my glove compartment, inasmuch as I had no glove compartment. And yet, somehow, a clear thought jumped into my head just as Officer One returned, license in hand. “If I unlocked this chain,” I asked, “would that do it?”  

Officer One frowned at Officer Three while Officer Two unfolded his arms so he could fold them again. “Sure,” Officer One replied with a shrug.  

It took only a moment for them to witness my demonstration, return my ID, thank me for my cooperation, and drive off. The blue and red flashing from their roofs gradually faded into the amber of the streetlights above my head. That night, I learned very important lesson: if I ever want to steal a bicycle in Bloomington, Indiana, I should bring my own lock and chain. 

I haven’t spoken to him since 2002. We didn’t have a fight or a falling out or anything spectacular like that; he just went about doing grownup things his way, and I went about doing grownup things my way. Recently, after a conversation with my wife, who knew him back in the day, I began to scour the Internets for him. It was shortly thereafter that he found me on Facebook. As is the case when rediscovering old friends through social networking, I took a look around his life, and that’s when I found a picture of his teenage daughter. 

She’s not the first child I know who’s grown up in the blink of an eye. There’s my ten-year-old niece, my best man’s twelve-year-old daughter, and my favorite college professor’s now sixteen-year-old son, for example. I don’t know why—most likely because I’ve had the pleasure of watching them transform—but seeing this young lady as a young lady really got under my skin, and it brought a lot back. 

In my collegiate youth, I was kind of (okay, very) moody. I’ve come to discover that this is a medical condition, but at that time, I just cycled and assumed I spent about half of my waking life as an asshole.  

Halfway through my sophomore year, in early 1996, I hit an upswing, cut my hair, wore some clothes with color, strapped on some confidence (albeit temporarily), and made some new friends. One of these had a freshman boyfriend who I knew I wasn’t going to get along with at all. For starters, he was a football player. Also, he was fit, both in athleticism and in the British sense of the word (i.e. hot); he was super-intelligent; and he was charming. Worst of all, he was genuinely kind, principled, and honest. So of course I hated him. And in no time at all, we were laughing, drinking, and smoking cigars together.  

That spring, I arranged to move into some off-campus, college-owned apartments, and I asked him to be my roommate. We found out quickly that sophomores were not permitted to live off campus, even in college-owned apartments. He persuaded the Dean of Housing to make an exception for him. (Have I mentioned that he was really, really persuasive?) 

Late summer, as football camp started up, he moved in, and he spent the next several weeks educating me on the finer points of the sport (which I’d never put much thought into before) and of East Coast versus West Coast (and “Mid Coast”— a term he invented) hip-hop. And all was good, until just before classes began, and his on-and-off-again girlfriend from back home was pregnant. 

So he did what any teenager would do: he quit the football team, brought her to his current home, found an apartment, found a job, and became a husband.* These things, of course, were all tricky: the first item because that robbed him of much of his financial assistance and social life; the second because he was asking her to leave her entire life behind to come to a place she knew nobody; the third because this was a college town, and there weren’t a lot of places to live for a family; the fourth because he would be supporting all two and a half of them, as well as his education, alone. The final proved to be exceptionally difficult, in that it cut him off from even more of his social life (at that age, nobody, including myself, understood why he would do all this). Also, his father, and his brother, aka his best man, were stranded in Colorado. 

The morning of his wedding, my friend showed up at my (formerly our) apartment, handed me a tuxedo, and said, “There’s been a change of plans.” If you’ve ever met this guy, you’d know that “There’s been a change of plans” coming from his mouth is the second most chilling phrase in the English language—the first being “We need to talk” coming from the mouth of a partner or spouse. And so I became his best man. To this day, pulling a toast out of my ass for the reception is one of my top-five achievements. 

They immediately became a unit. His identity was entirely husband and father; hers was entirely wife and mother; and this diminished them in no way whatsoever. In fact, it strengthened them. Most importantly, this unit was my friend.  

Our lives back then, as they are now, were separate from each other. For me the following years were full of turmoil, joy, and discovery. It was in the last year of college that I lost control over most of my life. His home (it wasn’t an apartment; it was a home) was safe. One of my favorite memories of that time, sitting cross-legged in the sun, chatting with her and watching the baby roll over. I don’t remember when exactly that was in my history, because the rest of that chaotic life didn’t exist inside those doors. Together, the three of them were vital to my survival back then, in ways I’ve never before expressed. 

I graduated, only barely; I became lost in my parents’ house; I became a man in New York; I became an adult and husband in my wife’s arms. Even though I’ve regenerated countless times, they’re the same: Her blue eyes are full of joy and excitement, even when she’s tired; his eyes are relaxed and confident; and the eyes of their baby, now a young woman, is full of life. They’re still a unit, and I can’t describe, no matter how much I want to, how happy that makes me. 

* Ha! Just kidding! Nobody would do that! 

I was in love with her for a long time. 

When I was young, I thought I understood love, as we all did. We’re told, though, that this was not what love is. So we ask, what is it then? They assure us that we’ll know when we find it; they can only tell us where not to look. 

We won’t find it in those sweaty, panting, gooey, sheet-clenching hours with someone in the dark. That’s just lust, they say. We won’t find it in those shared jokes and air kisses and physical intimacy that begins and ends in a hug. That’s only friendship, they say. And we definitely won’t find it in those lonely thoughts that send us plummeting in glorious freefall into daydreams. That, they say, is a crush. 

A crush. The term itself diminishes and purifies the epic scale of our emotions, waving them away as a product of our youth. As our bodies stretched into the shape of the people we were fated to become, we lost control of everything—even our hearts. Placing the responsibility for our feelings into the paws of hormones frees us from them; our feelings are allowed to recede into the past, along with that haircut and the algebra. 

But we really liked that haircut. That algebra class choked the life out of us for nine months. And he or she was our entire world. 

They tell me that I never really loved her. I listened to them. I wanted to be free. They said that, if I ever needed convincing, all I had to do was see her again. The years she now wears will help strip off the chrome of both the present and the past, and she’ll have always been just a crush. 

And then she spoke to me like she always did. She rolled her eyes and pursed her lips and giggled. And then she smiled at me. 

They’re wrong. I was in love with her. Because with that smile, why wouldn’t I be?