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? 

So it’s afternoon, and I’m moving heavy things from one room to another, trying to talk myself into hitting the treadmill downstairs, and my iPod shuffle kicks on “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” This in turn kicks on a memory. 

About six months ago, a combination of mp3 technology and space constraints necessitated the purging of our enormous household CD collection. For the most part, it was easy, but there were about a half-shelf of discs that we couldn’t bear to part with for sentimental reasons. Included in this collection is I Told You So, the one and only album by National B, because they’re an amazingly talented local band from Hastings, Nebraska that had long ago collapsed under the weight of the frontman’s ego. There is the rare single, “Jesus Build My Hotrod,” by Ministry, because it’s my favorite song. There’s Pearl Jam’s Ten, because it’s the first CD I ever bought. There’s Satanicide’s Heather, because it’s fucking Satanicide. 

And then there’s my copy of Nevermind, which is unique. Like every other copy of this groundbreaking album, the cover art is an image of a baby in a swimming pool, hypnotized by a dollar bill on a hook. On my copy, this iconic image is marred by a Sharpie scrawl that reads “Kurt Cobain.” This, incidentally, is not Kurt Cobain’s signature, and I’ve whiled away many an hour having to explain this to friends and dates. 

Once upon a time, a new acquaintance had given this disc to me, along with a story about a phone call from Kurt Cobain himself. Mr. Cobain, according to the tale, was the cousin of a friend (or a friend of a cousin—I doubt anyone remembers which). Since the storyteller had once lived in Washington State, it had to be true, as everyone in the Pacific Northwest clearly knew each other. Anyway, Mr. Cobain took it upon himself to mail to the storyteller four autographed copies of the hit album, which he could distribute to his friends and family as he saw fit. The details of the story were so perfect that it was clearly bullshit. But hey, free CD. 

Nearly twenty years later, the storyteller in question is still mortified by his behavior. There are a ton of reasons to be embarrassed, and lord knows that, had I done it, I would be too. Hell, I’ve got plenty to be embarrassed about, so one more event wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. See, back then, hormones, budding mental illness, and being a teenager in general made me one of the more unpleasant people I’ve ever met. I’d undergone so many changes in my personality in such a short period of time that I had no idea who I was anymore. I had friends, but most of them were going through the same crises as I, and so they were no particular help. 

And yet, here was this kid who looked up to me so much he was willing to do something so nakedly phony to get my attention. And even though I knew immediately that this was fake, and even though my mercurial moods led me to take advantage of and sometimes resent his desire to impress, I carried this album with me through countless moves across the country. Even when I first moved out East, when I could only afford to carry the clothing on my back and a handful of small items in a box, I made sure that my copy of Nevermind was among these. 

Thousands own this album. Of these, dozens own copies signed by any member of the band. But I’m one of four people who owns a copy forged by Jonathan, and that makes me so much cooler than everybody else. 

I wish there was a way I could possibly communicate how sincere I am about this, but alas, all I can say is “Thanks, dude,” and hope he’s listening. 

By 2002, I had lived several lives in New York City. I’d been a wide-eyed tourist, a jaded commuter, an unemployed pothead, a spurned lover, the most social of drunks, and very nearly a Casanova. I’d been broke and financially stable. I’d been profoundly unsure of myself and utterly confident. I’d been introverted and extroverted. The only constant in my life was the flux. That October, I was in between incarnations when I’d left work at The New York Post (another constant), caught the B, D, Q, or F train downtown to the Thirty-third Street PATH station, and saw Jenni. 

I wasn’t looking for Jenni at that point in my life, because at that point in my life, I’d completely lost track of her. It happens. But there she was, looking exactly as she did when I’d seen her last, about eight years prior. That’s not entirely accurate. There was one difference: in 1994, she was a girl—an elegant girl, but a girl nonetheless. In 2002, she was a woman. This wasn’t an issue of appearance; it just was. 

After I stood there, slack-jawed for a minute or so, I got her attention. It took her some time to figure out who I was (like I said, several lifetimes), it all fell into place. At first things were shaky. I’d been so busy trying to find myself that I didn’t have any time for nostalgia. We had dinner a few days later, exchanged numbers, and proceeded not to call each other. 

That fall, winter, and spring, I’d tried on a couple more identities—rock groupie and on-again-off-again boyfriend—until that summer when, at the insistence of an old friend I have since exorcised, I went out to dinner with Jenni and her new friend, Jennifer. Where nine months earlier, our reunion had been confused and distracted; this time, we clicked just as we had all that time ago. As such, we quickly caught up. 

Her passion then was dancing. This struck me as kind of weird. I’d never thought of her as particularly creative, but rather, focused, inquisitive, and matter-of-fact, kind of like Alice from Alice in Wonderland. In retrospect, this was shortsighted of me. She’d always had an artistic streak—whether it be from cooking experiments we’d undertaken in senior-year English or the maligned pom-pom dance squad; what she also had was determination, with which she’d tackled the challenges laid out before her. 

We spent the summer stealing evenings away from our crowded schedules, wandering around Spring Street looking for cheap food; or walking to or from her dance studio on the border of Soho and Tribeca, during the weekends when the streets were empty; eating at a bizarre vegetarian Asian food place, discussing the absence of love in our lives; or riding the Cyclone in Coney Island with her clamped so tightly on my bicep that it is now shaped differently forever; to later that evening on the beach where we found an amateur astronomer watching Mars through his telescope, inviting others to take a look. It was like dating, but without all that messy, time-consuming, headache-inducing romance, and as before, it brought with it peace. 

But the amount of fun she and I had together was nothing compared to the amount of fun we’d had with the other Jennifer. 

For a period of time several years back, my two best friends were named Jennifer. Our lives intersected and orbited and careened off of each other as lives often do. A few weeks ago, I watched Jennifer say “I do” while Jennifer beamed proudly on as the maiden of honor. 

The bride shall henceforth be known as Jenni, as that was her name when I met her in my junior-year English class at Gallup High School. If I remember correctly (and I often don’t), she had just transferred there from Italy—in a military capacity, though, meaning she was 100 percent American with a distinctly East Coast accent. All of the boys in class were endlessly fascinated with her, and it wasn’t at all difficult to discern why. She was stunning—what with her olive skin, dark brown curls bouncing off her shoulders, and the biggest, brightest eyes anybody at Gallup High had ever seen. 

Being an antisocial, antiestablishment tool, I chose to ignore her. At least I pretended to. At one point, I distinctly recall her slipping into class wearing a leather jacket and a deep green turtleneck. The combination of that with her intense curiosity and focus, aggressive kindness, fluttering energy like that of a hummingbird, and the way her pen twirled around her thumb when she was bored made me think, “She is so cool!” Being an antisocial tool, however, led me to denigrate the pom-pom dance squad for which she was trying out, and that put the kibosh on that relationship. 

That is until a year later. For reasons I, for the life of me, cannot recall, I earned myself an invitation to have lunch with her and her mother in their large, split-level home. The invitation stretched out into a regular, twice-a-week date. I wonder what the rest of the school saw when the awkward, long-haired, grungy Jeremiah folded up into a sky blue hatchback with the graceful, classy Jenni and rode off to parts unknown. 

Something you should probably know about me: I fell in love easily, particularly at that age. See, for the vast majority of people, adolescence really messes with them. For me, adolescence dragged me outside, smacked me around a bit, gave me a wedgie, and sent me on my way. It also whispered things in my ear. These things tended to give me The Wrong Idea—this Idea being crippling crushes that irreparably damaged friendships. 

I didn’t have one of these crushes on Jenni, and I’m not sure why. She has always been one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, both physically and spiritually. Hell, I remember how—many years later—she invited me out to the beach at Coney Island, and I thanked the lord that she hadn’t been sunbathing, because if I’d seen her in a bikini, that would have meant that it was okay for me to die. 

But I digress. The point is, I was free from my hormones to be friends with Jenni, and as such, I was able to relax in ways I couldn’t anywhere else in my life. And it was good. 

And I haven’t even mentioned our low-budget dramatization of The Taming of the Shrew wherein she played Petrucio and I played Katherine. And I won’t mention it because I have my dignity.