cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Girls Sent Me Letters In retrospect, Mary was one of several girls whose hearts I broke unintentionally between the ages of about 11-14. Mary reminded me the other night of Sarah, a gorgeous brunette whom I'd sort of rolled around with during camp one year. I must have been about 12, but I'm not exactly sure what year this was. She was easily the hottest girl at camp that year. A little taller than me and she had really neat skills. Her father had taught her all kinds of engine work and she could take just about anything apart. I feel like such an asshole for not having thought about her at all in the last 15 years. I had even forgotten her name. She was great. It was the quintessential summer camp romance. We sat together and got paired up for every activity we could and kissed sneakily behind the pool house. In retrospect, she was really my first proper girlfriend. Then camp was over. She wrote me letters. And this is the part that makes me a complete idiot: I never answered them. I had never written a girl a letter in my life at that point (although in high school I pretty well got over that). I just didn't know what I was supposed to do. So I didn't do anything. I put the letters in a desk drawer and got them out every day and read them. Same as I did with the ones that Mary sent me (holy shit, what an awful 2 weeks she must have had, watching me with Sarah). And suddenly I also recall that Sarah's best friend also wrote me a scented letter. He shorter friend with the huge tits. I had that one in my pocket and forgot it was there while I jumped in a swimming pool with my shorts on. Afterwards I found the the blue-streaked lumps of pulp in my pocket and felt terrible. Girls sent me letters. They sent wallet-sized school photos and misted the paper with perfumes that have stayed with me and still jerk my head around when I smell them in a crowded place. They wrote in a wide, loopy hand and dotted their letter 'i's with circles. Girls sent me letters and I put them in a drawer and smelled them and folded them back into their envelopes with the precious addresses written by their very hands. Girls sent me letters after I was gone. When it was more or less too late. Then a girl died right after I was gone and for a long time I didn't want to get letters from anyone else. In high school, girls sent me letters after the live-in young writers workshop that I went to each summer on a college campus. They still made big loops and circles over their 'i's, but now the letters usually had some references to smoking pot or drinking or otherwise asserting their maturity. One day, I decided to write a girl back. This was a girl who I didn't even especially remember meeting, but whom apparently had spent quite a lot of time noticing me. I found out what was involved in writing a letter to a girl. And she wrote back and somehow we got into a habit of decorating our envelopes by hand with outrageously detailed drawings, spending hours on this task before affixing a stamp. She sent me a photograph and eventually the time came when we professed our undying love for one another. Eventually, it ended disasterously. My heart was broken certainly far worse than what was felt by any of those girls whom I'd failed to write back to before. But the important thing was that now I knew how to write letters back to girls. Of course, nobody writes letters at all now. We write emails, which I think is better. An email can be responded to quickly and with a veneer of it being casual, in a way that was never the case with writing letters to girls when I was a kid. To all of those girls that I never wrote back to, I am so sorry. There was nothing wrong with you and you never did anything to deserve being ignored. *I* was the asshole, not you. It is stunning how long it took me to figure out the most basic elements of what to do about girls who write me letters, or girls who are the sort who would probably write me letters. What one is supposed to do is take her somewhere alone and kiss her right away. Don't wait until the last minute. Don't wait until you are both about to leave. Do it right away. And then write letters to her. 3:12 p.m. - 2010-04-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||