There Was a Boy and He Loved Me

This was it. I’d found the summit. There was nowhere else to go.

I pulled up short and stopped to listen, but I heard nothing. I dug deeper, trying to reclaim some feeling from the past. Something. Anything. A familiar tree, a sound, a secret clearing behind the grove of ash trees. Anything that would bear testimony that a boy who loved me once brought me here.

I drank in the quiet for a moment, then looked around me. A rickety wooden bench hid itself just inside the heavy tree line in front of me, and I decided it would hold me. It had to. I needed a seat.

If I’d ever sat on this bench before, which I doubted, I’d have been a hundred pounds lighter, thirty-five years younger, an eternity prettier, and a lifetime more naïve. Whether or not the bench and I were acquainted before, it welcomed me now and held me as a tear dripped off my chin, and then another. Has the whole of my life been reduced to this? An empty Alpine Slide marked only by disintegrating pieces of cement track running down the mountain. A single unattached flailing wire overhead that once carried ski lifts laden with passengers to the top, to this spot where I now sat alone.

The more tears that fell, the more tears came.

“There was a boy and he loved me,” I spoke it aloud. Maybe that would make it real.

I tried again, louder, “There was a boy and he loved me.” Better.

Did it matter? I wouldn’t have traded the life I had for any other. I wouldn’t have forfeited my husband, my family, my entire world for this boy. So why did it matter? Why was I crying?

Every experience helps make us who we are. Without one of them, we wouldn’t be the same. But our memories are bent by time. They’re untrustworthy at best. What they present to us as fact has been bent by the hot fires of life.

Suddenly, I had to know if it was real; if the boy who loved me really did. In some way, I was proving that I am who I am today, legitimately and truly.

And so, I wept and remembered and prayed for clarity and peace.

It was the last month of the last year of my undergraduate experience when I met him; some part of me wants to call him James, but it doesn’t seem quite right. I attended a private school in Chattanooga, and he attended the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I’m not sure how I met him, though I do remember hanging out at parties with a bunch of students from his school. But this wasn’t a “party” kind of relationship.

However, wherever I met him, I liked him. A lot. He was good-looking, athletically built, and sported a wholesome look and a winning smile. He was quiet, laid back. But when he spoke to me, his brown eyes looked straight into mine and made me feel like I was the only person in his world. And when we weren’t talking, we were comfortable. We didn’t need words, and we didn’t try to manufacture them. When he touched me, it was natural, not forced, and his touch made me feel like a treasured jewel instead of a forbidden fruit. It felt real, not contrived; it felt like love, not lust, though I didn’t allow myself to use words like that back then.

If I am nothing else, I am logical to a fault. I process emotions privately and slowly, and I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. And logic and experience told me a long-distance relationship going into summer, and especially going into the summer after my college graduation, was a bad idea. I would be returning to Indiana, and not coming back to Tennessee; he was leaving college altogether and not coming back.

And so, on a sunny weekday spring morning, time growing short, we’d decided to spend the entire day together beside the lake. We both cut all our classes for the day and called in sick to our jobs. And now, here we were, unhurried, uncomplicated, but increasingly aware of the brevity of our time.

“What’s going to happen to us? I can’t do long distance,” I said. I knew my tone was flat. It was the only way I could be sure I wouldn’t erupt into tears.

“Me neither. Never works, does it?” I’d heard weather reports delivered with more feeling.

“Nope,” I agreed. “It’s a bad idea all the way around.”

We lay on our backs on a white blanket. His warm hand reached for mine, and words stopped, suspended in air, but they weren’t gone.

Finally, he spoke, “Can you see the lion in the clouds? There’s his mane, and see his tail?”

“I do. And see Winnie-the-Pooh up there?” I was content just to occupy the same space with him in that moment. He rolled over to kiss me and looked long and hard into my eyes, but the unspoken words were still suspended between us.

“We don’t have long.” Logic was getting the best of me, and I started pulling the words out of the air.

“No,” he said. Another kiss.

“When’s your last day of school?”

It was worse than I thought. My classes were over in a month, but his classes let out in just two weeks.

Two weeks. That was what we had.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Maybe not so much.” This time, I rolled toward him and propped up on my elbows. How did I land such a gorgeous guy? Such a beautiful person? He pulled me down on top of him, and his body was firm and comforting, welcoming. His lips were warm, his touch was sure. His hands on my waist drew me in. It didn’t feel tenuous, or on the brink, or in question. It felt like forever. It felt like never. It felt like a dream.

Entangled together in the blanket, secluded in a sunny patch hidden by trees, I slept until his fingers curled through my hair, and his lips brushed my forehead.

“I brought food,” he said after a while, and I sat up. I’d dated a lot of guys, but never one who’d brought a picnic lunch. He pulled out bananas, lunch meat sandwiches, and various other items I don’t recall.

I sat cross-legged and looked at him again. There was something in his eyes. Even at my young age, I’d known love before, and I was sure this wasn’t it. This thing. It couldn’t be. I’d only known him for a couple of weeks, and I wasn’t a believer in love at first sight. Still, I couldn’t stop looking into his eyes. They knew me intimately and, in that moment, I was unafraid of being known.

Another hour passed. We ate, watched swimmers splashing in the lake, made small talk, watched the clouds tumble into shapes, until we finally came back to the conversation that wouldn’t end.

“I can’t keep in touch after school,” he said.

“Me neither. I’m bad at it,” and I really was. I had a track record to prove it. I fell out of touch with Doug, my high school boyfriend, who stayed home when I left for school. Steve, my boyfriend at the end of my freshman year of college, had finally moved on when I failed to send him even one letter or card over the summer. Mike, the guy I dated at the end of my sophomore year of college, came back from summer vacation engaged. I was truly bad at it.

“What if we just did this every day, and when it’s over, it’s over?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, though his idea was taking shape in my mind, too.

“Well, you know. This. What if we cut all our classes? What if we quit work a couple of weeks early? Just spent every day together?”

“But wouldn’t we, you know… get too involved?” I was afraid now. I could feel myself falling.

“We won’t. We both know it can’t work. I’m going home, and so are you.”

“Yeah,” I said. Logic wins every time. I never hated logic more than in that moment. On the other hand, it offered freedom I hadn’t considered before. Could I let myself fall? And then let it all go? Just walk away at the end?

“I have one class I can’t cut,” I said, “But I think I can quit my job.” I was cleaning house for two different older ladies, true southern belles who lived up on Missionary Ridge in old estate homes, presumably inherited or bought with old money. I was going to be quitting in four weeks anyway…

“I already quit my job,” he admitted. He worked at a factory and had never really liked it. “And I only have two classes,” he finished.

“Can we really do this?” I giggled at the thought. It was ridiculous. It was risky. It was unthinkable. But I was mesmerized by the possibility.

My giggles turned into an all-out belly laugh. We both were giddy at the thought, and fell back onto the blanket, until the laughter ended in a kiss. That firm, inviting body pulled me in again, but only for a moment this time.

“But do we need some rules?” I pulled back to look at his face.

“Like, for one, we don’t talk about feelings,” I added.

“That’s a good one. And no contact after we go home.” He was dead serious.

“And no goodbye. Just… no goodbye,” I finished.

“I can do that.”

“So can I,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure.

That night, thirty-five years ago, we went to the Alpine Slide on Raccoon Mountain. Somewhere near where I now sat on my new friend, the dilapidated bench, there had been an obscure grove of ash trees that formed a sweet alcove for lovers seeking a sneaked kiss.

I remember the feel of his arms around me in the ash tree alcove, on one of only two occasions in which we broke the rules.

He said, “Remember this. This right here. This right now. Because I’m going to say something I’ll never say to you again. You’ll have to listen closely because I’m going to say it quietly, exactly when the next ski lift group unloads, when it gets noisy. One time. Then it will almost be like I never said it.”

Thirty seconds later, he whispered, barely audible over the laughter of the group getting on the ski lift, “I love you now and forever.”

And I heard him. There was a boy and he loved me.

And I loved the boy. But he’d clamped his hand over my mouth to keep me from saying so. The tears started again, moistening the bare wood of the bench, as I grieved for words left unsaid.

And so that night at the Alpine Slide, I fell. We fell. Willingly, on purpose that night, we fell into a relationship with a guaranteed tearful ending. But it also held a guaranteed promise. Would we, could we really survive one to revel in the other? We were determined to find out.

Two weeks of living in the moment started that night, the clock counting down to an expiration date we did our best to ignore. We logged hours at Chickamauga Lake, Chickamauga Battlefield, Nickajack Lake and dam, Missionary Ridge, and Lookout Mountain. We drove to Rossville, Georgia, and to all the places in between. We lived every day to the fullest, spent every waking moment together, and laughed and played like the clock was set to “forever.” Lips on lips, skin on skin, hands entwined, bodies close. It felt like love, but that wasn’t allowed, so I put it out of my mind, once and for all.

And we kept the rules, except for the night at the Alpine Slide. Right up until the very end, we kept the rules. No discussions of feelings, no promises to keep in touch.

Then one spring day, we ended just as suddenly as we started. Our last day finally arrived. The clock had counted down to zero. Time had expired. When he dropped me off at my dorm, we didn’t kiss. We didn’t say goodbye. He told me he was headed home tomorrow and wished me a good summer. I put my hand on his leg for a moment before he let me out in front of the dorm. He didn’t get out of the car to walk me to the door. No one cried. There were no gifts, no cards, no indication of all that passed between us for two beautiful weeks.

It was over.

It occurs to me that I can’t remember what we did on our last day. I can’t remember because we made it like every other day. We kept the rules. And it hurt.

But there was one rule we didn’t keep entirely. As soon as he got home, he wrote a brief letter to me while I was still at school, finishing my final two weeks, trying my best to re-assimilate into student life, even though my heart wasn’t in it.

The letter was chatty, brief, impersonal, and dismissive. He said he wouldn’t write again, and I threw the letter away.

Now, all these years later, I cried the tears I never cried back then. until every tear was spent. I walked around looking for traces of the big trunks of old ash trees. I stood where I thought the ski lifts might have loaded and unloaded. I walked a little way down the disintegrating cement track. When I listened, if I really tried, I heard the laughter of people having fun, making memories.

Finally, I waited. I waited for the wind to stop blowing the leaves. I waited until no faraway train whistles sounded and there was no indication of passing cars. I listened and I heard it once more. The quiet whisper of a boy breaking the rules.

Yes, no matter what it may have cost me, no matter what kind of person it made me, it was true.

There was a boy and he loved me.