I spent the summer when I was 17 building houses for impoverished families in Wyoming, and I fell in love with Ben, a 23-year-old from Georgia who had just graduated from SUNY Binghamton and was about to start an M.F.A. program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins. His girlfriend was the co-counselor, and I liked her too, but I was really in love with Ben. One day it started raining when we were working, and he and I just sat on the skeleton of a roof of a house we were building and talked.
It was very romantic.
I think he sort of loved me too. He once told me that if he wasn't dating Jenya (who broke up with him a few months after the summer, and married someone else, at the age of 24, within two years), he would want to marry me.
Meanwhile, I spent the summer dicking around this kid Jon, who was nice and also 17. I was sort of mean, I guess, but only because I was in love with someone else.
At the end of the trip, we made little books for everyone to sign. Jon wrote about how much he liked me, and delineated all of the ways he had screwed everything up, and how he wished I had been his girlfriend, and not whatever I actually was (which, in retrospect, was a bitch). Ben teased me about how I talked and then wrote, "Give boys a chance and you just might stop twitching." In the airport, back in New York, Ben told my parents how I was the smartest person on the trip. Actually he said, "Well, her and her boyfriend."
Which was a lie, because I didn't have a boyfriend. The whole point was, I was in love with him.
Oh, Ben. I stalk him occasionally. He graduated from the M.F.A. program, and this summer I found him on friendster, and even though I had been in self-imposed hiding for my entire 5th bout on the site, I immediately friendstered enough people so that it wouldn't seem weird if I friendstered Ben. He still hasn't accepted.
Maybe he never loved me at all.
It doesn't matter though, really. I'm way over Ben. Like, ocean over. But, I feel sort of worried, because I haven't stopped twitching. I think I've given boys chances, but I still shake when I'm anxious.
Which is too often.
One day we have to give the Jons chances, and not the Bens, right? But it's no fun to make out with/give perfunctory blowjobs to someone you don't really like tremendously. Or, it's kind of fun, but not really fun.
Not awesomely fun.
When I was 17, I thought Ben was insanely wise.
Now, I'm not so sure.
And here I am, still a-twitch, and much closer in age to how old Ben was then than how old I was. And he seemed old.
Fucking A, man. Fucking A.
-Yona
