originally published for Valentine’s Day 2010
As an equal homage to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to discuss the loves of my life.
I think it’s probably easiest to stick with a chronological system… Something were not terribly used to doing with Eben07 comics.
So my first love – Crystal. She was my neighbor. A cliche for a reason, when you live next door to a girl next door, it’s usually the first girl you get interested in and vice versa. For most of those early years, where girls still have that aura of cooties, it was forced. Neither of us had siblings, the cul-de-sac we lived in was full of old people or kids too old to involve us in their activities, so our reluctant play dates were filled in a 50/50 fashion where I was Ken or Tenderheart Bear and she was Bumblebee or the Baroness.
As we approached the sixth grade together I started getting those crank calls whenever, coincidentally, she’d be having sleepovers. The calls that went: “Crystal thinks you’re cute” and then ::click:: – I have to say, I miss those most of all. There was no greater and quicker a confidence boost than a perceived stranger letting you know somebody thinks you’re cute – especially when you think she is cute, too. I definitely could have used a few in high school and college. But that’s for later.
It was in the spring of sixth grade, one day, when Crystal and I were walking home from the bus stop and she grabbed my hand and held it all the way to her mailbox. That was definitely the first time I felt that loving feeling – my hand tickled the rest of the night, kinda almost missing the feeling of her hand.
From there it was pretty much the same thing week to week; it was kinder and gentle than any relationship I’ve had.
Crystal ended up being my first kiss on the same day she moved away. Another cliche moment that isn’t cliche until you grow up and realize this pretty much has happened a million times and then you get over it. And I did; Crystal did too. She moved, we kept in touch. Other pursuits eventually came into our lives and those innocent feelings of love were swallowed by distance, rising stamp prices, and, ultimately, the pursuit of international espionage.
Junior high was spent trying to sort out the nonsense of figuring out that girls weren’t the enemy. I knew that if I ever planned on talking to one, I’d need to start smelling less, you know, like a teenage boy as well as fight my mother on the subject of acceptable modern teenage fashion.
I came out of junior high without any prospects of romantic entanglement, but I was optimistic that I’d started to figure myself out and somehow knew things were going to be okay. But that summer I blossomed into the lovable loser: the glasses, acne, and braces had all mightily morphed into a facial super Voltron that all but cinched the deal that I wasn’t going to be a ladies man anytime soon.
Ninth grade was upon me and I felt that was the bus ride of doom for my inner Don Juan.
But fortune smiled upon me in my English class, I sat behind the new girl. And Christina was the next love.
Christina was equally stunted by the forces of future beauty and straight teeth. We were paired into a reading group and quickly 
discovered we had attractive inner selves. Soon notes were passed, those evolved into lunches, which occasionally became make-outs after school. Thinking about it now, it was probably a pretty revolting sight: our braced mouths – like a pair of star-cross’d garbage disposals – mangled each other, rubber banded and swollen, mashing like tomorrow isn’t coming. These were not great kisses – both of us knew this activity was simply a bad appetizer before a main course – and I think that’s exactly why Christina left. In the race to get the braces off – she won and I trailed behind. Contacts became available for her and not me. Her outer beauty began to shine, matching the inner beauty I’d seen for a long time, and it turned out by mid-junior year I had been dating a goddess. She was incredible – it was like an episode of Jenny Jones, and this butterfly, as much as she liked me, knew her other goddess friends grew tired of having Quasimodo popping by for lunch to run his girlfriends lips over his cheese grater mouth.
Christina bent to the whim of better kisses and social pressures. At the time, I would never have said that. I would have said she crushed me, destroyed me, pulled my heart out like Mola Ram and melted it into Gak.
I can’t blame her, I very well may have done the same act of immaturity had my braces come off first and looked like Johnny Depp.
Read on with Part 2!
