Today I’m thinking about my… third (?) crush. Not my first crush (kindergarten, she and I have gone on to become friends and that’s a wonderful thing) and not my second crush (2nd or 3rd grade? I got teased by my “friends” about her and one day when DANE told her I LIKED her she used STRONG 9 year-old language and said she’d rather ROT IN HELL!!!)…. No, my 3rd crush. 4th grade. Probably the last of the pure, pre-hormonal crushes. Where holding hands or a shy smooch would be still the most you could imagine, when it’s just beauty and shyness and lust hasn’t entered the brain (or more correctly, the body).
This was the first PINING. This was a girl who’s name was in a popular SONG at the time so I could pine good and PROPER.
Sara(h) – I’ll never find another girl like you, no
We’re fire and ice, and a dream.
Yep, old enough to be quite angsty about it too.
Anywho, we went to separate schools shortly thereafter and it wasn’t till the weird connectivity of Facebook that we were ever really reconnected. And by “reconnected” I mean “friend request” “friend accepted” because we were both connected by ANOTHER friend from middle school but of such things are “connections” made nowadays.
In any case – a post of hers crossed my desk today, one of those “repost if” kind of things that I generally read and maybe I’ll “like” or respond to, but I don’t repost – you’d be at it all day. It was a call for support for those who struggle with alcohol and drug addiction and I was momentarily struck by the way in which our Lives clearly had taken dramatically different directions – we’ve not seen one another for 30+ years, and yet EVERYONE is struck in some way by chemical addiction.
We make token efforts to address it. We criminalize the less socially-acceptable drugs and glorify weed and alcohol. We blur out cigarettes and warn of their presence in movies. And yet it’s a ubiquitous presence in our Lives.
What a stupid thing to be the common thread tying the experience of humanity (or at least American Life) together.