We Go Way Back

When I think back on all the people who have made my heart totally freak out in one way or another, the childhood crushes stand out in a pretty special way. Like a fierce band of tiny, iridescent guardian angels watching over my romantic exploits for all time.

I got started early, to be sure. Ashley O’Bryan (my bff before we’d heard of the term “bff”) and I tragically discovered that we harbored romantic feelings for the same nine-year-old boy (I think she and I were still eight, we were two of the youngest in our grade). But rather than let our friendship unravel because of this unforeseen rivalry, it became something over which we bonded. We made little hope boxes and "invented" a highly sophisticated alpha-numeric code to talk about him: 31 was his name.

Of course we were filling our hope boxes with wishes for the same thing, wishes that were mutually exclusive, but for some reason that didn’t bother us. Probably because at that age, friendship was already a familiar concept, whereas love was not. The original bros before hos. Plus what did having a boyfriend in the 4th grade mean? That you would perhaps clandestinely hold hands at some point? In retrospect even that sounds pretty risqué. But a friend was someone you ate lunch with and had sleepovers with. Ashley was my first friend who had nail polish.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. My tiny heart was ready to burst. I wrote 31 a note, and slipped it into his locker. I told him that I wanted to reveal my true feelings, but wouldn’t write who I was. I would meet him by the bio-dome (our name for the metal structure that served as a jungle gym, set apart from the true “big toy” in the main playground area… this was a place for outsiders) on top of the hill during recess. I would be wearing a headband (I wore headbands everyday, it was a point of pride) and a “squiggly mouth smiley-face necklace” (oh! the irony. Even my eight-year old self couldn’t wear a true smiley face necklace! Especially not on today of all days!).

The jig was up before I had my chance to climb the hill. Lauren Denbaum confronted me. 31 had shown her the note. She knew it was me, I was wearing the headband. “Yes, but what about…” I began, knowing that my squiggly mouth smiley-face necklace was securely tucked under my turtleneck. Just then, Lauren’s hand darted towards my throat. Before I could do anything, she had pulled the necklace out, revealing me to be the note-writer. “This, you mean?” she laughed triumphantly. I had been foiled.

31 emerged from the playground shadows to stand behind Lauren. His henchgirl had done her work, now it was time for him to handle the situation. “I thought it might be you,” he said. I reached behind me for support. Ashley was of course there to back me up. “The thing is…” 31 began.

Just then Lauren interjected. “He likes her!” she shouted, as children on playgrounds are wont to do. Her finger was pointing in my direction. But quickly I realized it wasn’t me she was leering at. Of course, just over my shoulder, holding my hand, was Ashley O’Bryan. My bff. My co-conspirator. 31 was hers.

I let go of Ashley’s hand and ran off up the hill, to resume my outsider position on the bio-dome. Maybe no one would see me cry up there. But I heard a voice behind me, “Ani!”. It was Ashley. She followed me up the hill. I climbed the metal bars as fast as I could, but she was right behind me. She sat down next to me at the top. The highest point on the playground.

“I told him I don’t like him,” she said.
“What? But you do. It’s 31!”
“I don’t care. I like being your best friend better.”


My next really serious childhood crush came in Miss Patterson’s fifth grade class. Our desks were arranged in groups of four. Mine was next to a boy named J. We made little creatures out of paper clips and erasers and created an epic world that existed between our desks. J and I both liked fantasy novels and wiled away field trip bus rides discussing elves and the like.

Ashley O’Bryan had moved away, and the group of girls I’d been friends with since first grade had ditched me because I still wanted to play pretend, whereas they wanted to talk about the Spice Girls and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I was the only one who didn’t have bell bottoms from Limited Too. So I began spending more time with two girls named Katie. On weekends I would go to Katie S.’s house and find J there with his family. We’d run through the woods to the lake, he was tall and faster than I was. I would tease him about being a giraffe… he didn’t like that.

The entire fifth grade took a trip to Cape Cod to go whale watching. On the boat J and I stood next to each other, leaning slightly over the edge. The ocean spray got in our eyes and mouths and we loved every second of it—there’s a photo of us looking like the two happiest kids who ever lived. I can’t help but think our grins were inspired by something slightly more than the thrill of the sea.

As the summer neared my grandpa took the cover off the pool. Now, the Katonah public pool was one thing, but having access to a private swimming pool was something else entirely. My mom said I could invite J to come swimming.

So I called… I can’t remember if I left a voicemail or spoke to J’s mom. Either way the reply came, a message on the answering machine at my mom’s house. “Hi Annika, this is J… uh, you called my house… I don’t really know why you called… anyway… yeah. See you at school.”

Ugh. Well, that was that, I thought. At least I had gotten out before another 31-style embarrassment struck. I was ten now, and much older and wiser.

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Time went on, as it does. And we got older, as kids do. A year later J invited me to his birthday party. By this time Sam M. and I were as boyfriend-girlfriend as sixth graders can be. During the game of flashlight tag, Sam pulled me around the side of J’s house and dared me to kiss him. I did. I don’t think J ever truly got over the fact that my “first kiss” was at his house, on his birthday, and not with him.

Middle school saw a lot of changes for me. Sam led me into the world of bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit, and by seventh grade all the eighth grade “punks” were totally into me and I was going to Less Than Jake and Catch 22 concerts in the city. Trust me, this made me very grown up. In eighth grade I dated a high school freshman. We would spend weekend afternoons making out in his basement. But that Valentines day, J showed up to school with a small heart-shaped box of chocolates for me. “J, you know I have a boyfriend,” I told him. “Yeah, I know, I just wanted you to have that. Happy Valentines Day, Annika.”

The first three years of high school were not pretty. Freshman year I was confused enough to befriend a man who turned out to have a history of molesting girls my age. He drove me home most days and at one point managed to get me behind a door I didn’t know was locked. Thank God my mom caught onto that one before its inevitable conclusion. Sophomore year I started dating a guy who went to another high school and was three years older than I was. He would (inevitably) go off to college, start dating another girl without telling me, and break my heart. Junior year was basically a haze of eating disorders and vile rumors. And then senior year, all of the older kids had gone off to college, and I was left with my old Katonah crew.

These kids had actually become pretty neat while my back was turned. It was a tight-knit group of budding musicians, poets, artists, actors. Perhaps a little self-consciously hip, but not self-consciously “outsider”. For the most part, these guys were socially adept and also self-confident.

I forget how, but J and I had become pretty good pals over the summer. Maybe it was because we were both in the pilot year of our school’s Peer Group Leadership program. Anyway I seem to recall driving around in his teal station wagon, getting coffee after hours at various local hot-spots, or climbing onto the roof of the shed at the house my family was going to move into come fall. We reminisced about our childhood crushes on each other, how I figured it was all over when he left that message on my answering machine. “It came out like that because I was nervous!” he insisted. “I always liked you. I was sad you didn’t call me back.”

“And in middle school, when you gave me chocolates on Valentines day?”
“Yeah, I liked you then too.”

We decided that if we were both still single come spring, we would go to prom together.

Speaking of relationships… well I of course unloaded on him a bit about my heartbreaks up until that point. J was sort of intimidated by my experience with matters of the heart—
he was always the friend, never the boyfriend. “Why do you think that is?” he asked me. “And what about us?”

“Oh, us? Like you and me? Honestly, J… I just don’t see you that way.”

I was far too world-weary to date such an innocent, I thought. It would never work. J was a boy, I needed a man. Plus his eternal positivity, his sunny disposition… where was his dark side? Did he even have one? Because I was basically one big dark side. How would he ever understand me? Happily I can say that I was far more cynical (and dramatic) at seventeen than I am today.

A week or two after this conversation, J and I were sitting in the parking lot of the Jacob Burns Film Center after seeing some cool new indie flick. He was playing the game where he counts the freckles on my face. I told him my favorite was on my mouth. He kissed me. I pulled away, saying I wasn’t expecting that. He gave me a look like “Are you fucking kidding me?” and there it was, the slightest glimmer of a cynical edge. That was all I needed.

Are you ready to puke yet?

What ensues is more or less the montage you’d expect. Rides home steeped in The Shins, fighting over who would hang up first, illicit make-out sessions before our parents got home from work. Every holiday we had some sort of surprise for each other. More inside jokes than I can possibly recall. Notes in lockers. Nicknames galore. He was the director of his a cappella group, I was speaker of the Campus Congress.

J’s best pal was E, and they shared a glorious and profound brotherhood, the depths of which I could never fully comprehend, probably because I didn’t have an equivalent childhood best friend. Like I said, my girlfriends since first grade ditched me in late elementary school, and Ashley O’Bryan moved away. J and I would double date with E and his girlfriend, who was unbelievably gorgeous and, for whatever it was worth, “popular”.

On a peer group leadership retreat, E played banjo while J and I sang back-up harmonies on a cover of Such Great Heights. Keep in mind, this was the year Garden State came out.

OK, now you’re ready to puke.

We had our share of problems, too. J was always so on the bright side and I was always so on the dark side. I think it was exhausting for both of us at times. This was J’s first relationship and he was maybe not ready to hit the ground running as hard as I was. He directed a one act and didn’t cast me because he was afraid it would look like he was favoring me and like I didn’t earn it. Plus there was his relationship with E— neither E nor I were used to sharing J. And sometimes J’s life-plans seemed to include E in a way that they didn’t include me.

J’s friends teased him for spending too much time with me. I was a part of the greater “group”, but once the group divided into girls and guys, I was left out in the cold, because I wasn’t truly close enough with the girls to be in their inner circle, and obviously couldn’t hang with the dudes. This left me feeling excluded and vulnerable.

I even remember feeling a certain dissatisfaction with how “perfect” my life was at that time. Afternoons I worked in a third-generation family-owned department store in pretty much the quaintest hamlet you can imagine. I was held in high esteem by the administration of my high school and held multiple leadership positions. My mom was engaged, so maybe we were even going to have a new “normal” family. And I had just about the best boyfriend a girl could ask for. Even I was ready to puke.

Because I had pretty much defined myself as an outsider ever since my parents were, as far as I knew, the first to get divorced. I was the youngest in my grade. I had a weird name. My birthday was on Christmas. I was the girl who hung out on the bio-dome, remember? So what was I doing behaving so goddamned normally all of sudden?

But, and maybe this is hindsight speaking, I think our relationship came down to more than the montage. In the spring it became apparent that, against all odds, I had actually only gotten into my safety schools. One of which, after a second visit, I had decided I didn’t like. It looked like it was Oberlin or bust. Ohio? My plan had been California. Was I really going to Ohio? After a hysterical phone call prompted by yet another rejection letter, J showed up at my house with applications to every top school that offered rolling admissions. He was determined to help me see the bright side. And in the long run, I really think he did.

We kept our prom promise, obviously. He wore Converse sneakers. We danced our faces off. Afterwards, instead of going into the city as planned, our whole crew decided to go back to Katonah and play flashlight tag. It was genuinely exhilarating. At the end of the night, J and I had sex in his car before crashing on a pile of comforters on his living room floor.

Of course summer came to an end. We were very practical children, we knew it would. And we knew that he was off to Bates, and I was off to Oberlin, so there it was. As a going away present, I gave him stationary I had designed for him, along with envelopes that were pre-addressed to my college mailbox. And that was that. Neither of us wanted to get each other’s way.

By October I was up to my old tricks. I had a boyfriend who was a fifth year, and five years older than I was.

In February J and I were both home on break. “I wanted to give you a sort of Valentines Day Present,” he said.
“But J, you know I have a boyfriend.”
“Yeah, I know. I just wanted you to have this.”

He proceeded to play me two songs on guitar, songs that we had listened to together a lot. “Happy Valentines Day, Annika.” I was simultaneously touched, sad, guilty, and embarrassed.

That summer J and I saw each other again. I told him how the college boyfriend had graduated and was leaving the country at the end of the summer, and I had become involved in an affair with a man who was twice my age and lived upstate. J and I didn’t talk much after that.

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It's been nearly seven years since then. Recently I was performing a workshop version of a one-woman play I had written at a festival in Tribeca, and Katie S. showed up. She filled me in on our old friends, including the fact that J was going to be in town soon. Things had been kind of hard for him lately, she said. There had been some life altering events to bang up against.

A few days later I typed a facebook message to J. Facebook because I didn’t even have his current email or phone number. I told him how I know it had been forever, but if he wanted to hang with someone in New York, I was around. And if he didn’t answer not to worry, because who really checks facebook anyway. He did answer. We agreed to meet the next day, his last day in town, for coffee.

J looked tired, and had come from the hospital. He was wearing a hat and I could tell it was more to hide his unwashed hair than for warmth or fashion. He wore a small Buddha necklace, a vestige of who he was already starting to become that last summer we were together. Something about him spending time in India during college nagged at the back of my mind. It was all so long ago….

We talked about what was going on at the hospital. We talked about J’s brother, how J believed that the cosmic reason he had moved to L.A. was to save him. We talked about New York (where he had lived while I was in Boston). “Do you want to get a drink?” I asked him. “Do you even drink? Last we talked, you didn’t drink.” “Ha, yeah, that’s probably true,” he chuckled. “I drink.”

Around the corner I downed a Manhattan on the rocks while he drank something that involved gin and lavender. “Sorry I drink faster than you do, too much time in nightlife.” He laughed and assured me he would catch up. “Oh, I love this song,” he said, before he had fully recognized what was playing. It was the Shins. We blushed when we realized why he loved it. Next up was Modest Mouse. “Did they steal my ipod from 2005?” I joked. We only touched on high school for perhaps five minutes before he realized he had to go back to the hospital. “I have to get back up there because I have to be back in Westchester tonight so my dad can drive me to the airport early in the morning.”
“Oh, you’re flying out of Westchester?”
“No, JFK.”
“Well, why don’t you stay at my place and I’ll drive you to JFK? That makes way more sense geographically.”

It was a plan. “Is bourbon OK?” I asked.

He got to my place a little before midnight, where I introduced him to Ian, my roommate and best friend. Ian and I met during maybe our second week of college, at a time when J and I would have still been talking on the phone every few days. In a way they represented a sort of changing of the guard in my life.

For some reason I started telling the story of Sarah K., Ian’s childhood love. The conversation turned to mutual friends we didn’t know we had. We discovered that Sarah K., the Sarah K., had been in acting classes with J in New York. My childhood love was in acting studio with Ian’s childhood love. “There are like, six people in the world,” J declared.

When we were (more than…) half way through the bottle of bourbon, J and I tumbled down the slope of childhood memories. It was just as he recounted the tale of “my favorite freckle is on my lip” that Ian declared he was going to bed. “You know what’s funny about that?,” I mentioned as Ian sleepily roused himself from our cozy carpet, “I don’t have a freckle on my lip.” “Of course you don’t,” J was staring straight at me. “Alright, you two, I’m going to bed.” Ian stumbled into his room, closing the door rather finitely.

I couldn’t really tell you what it was. Maybe it was spending two years in a city like New York, getting beat up by the real world a little bit. Maybe it was because he was now essentially the vice-principal of a high school and had learned to exude authority. Maybe because of what was going on at the hospital. Maybe because he weighed probably twenty pounds more than when I had known him, and no longer had his Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo haircut. But this was not the boy I dated in high school. I mean, it was, but he had somehow grown into the best version of himself I could have imagined. And somehow, I sensed he felt the same way about me. He made me feel better about myself in six hours than the Chef had made me feel in a year and a half.

Now, this had very little to do with anything he said. He was not lathering me up with compliments, be they based in the past or the present. It was something far more fundamental. His blatant positivity was now tempered with an edge of “I know what it’s like, and I still mean it.” And I remembered that night he had shown up at my house, showing me all the schools I could still apply to. And I realized that J had always been the MVP on Team Annika. I was essentially warming the bench, and for all I know, Chef was on an opposing team.

This is not to say that I blame Chef. I may not have been ready to let him on my team. Because on some level he came to represent all that is rough and harsh about this city to me. And J comes from a place that, even though I wasn’t always happy there, is part of me. It’s safe there.

When I look back on high school, I see a series of frustrations and embarrassments. The stupid things I said and my weird outfits and really crappy decision-making, the overwhelming disappointments, the personal and academic failures, the drama. If you asked to see a photo of me from high school, I probably wouldn’t show it to you. But J saw all that, and somehow still thought I was coolest girl in school.

When I look back on my first year-or-so in New York, I see… well I see pretty much the same things. But I think I’m a little better at hiding it. Taking things in stride. The fact remains, however, that Chef has seen all that. The late nights and the professional rejections. The bad days. But if he thought I was the coolest girl in school, he never let me know.

Cosmically speaking, J moved to L.A. to save his brother. Maybe he came to New York that week to get me off the bench and back in the field, playing on my own team. For a long time my embarrassment around who I used to be made me glad to have few ties to my pre-college self. But those hours we spent together changed my mind: I hadn't felt that OK in a long time.

Ian sees Sarah K. around Brooklyn, I see her too. I don’t know if he experiences the same overwhelming comfort in her presence. Their love was unrequited, so perhaps not. I’m not sure if there’s an objectively heartwarming experience about reconnecting with your high school sweetheart– if it’s all just a societally constructed load of whatever, or if maybe J and I genuinely had something kind of neat and special. Maybe we’re buying into some idea that has no bearing on reality. Maybe I’m so fucked up about the end of my relationship with Chef, and he’s so fucked up about the things that are going on his life, that we’re just begging for some sort of emotional cluster fuck.

That said, it is important to bear in mind that J is perhaps the only boy I ever loved who was really, truly my friend first. Ashley O’Bryan and I had prioritized friendship over our mutual crush 31 because friendship was a more familiar sensation. And when J and I had these fifth grade crushes on each other, what did that really mean? Friendship was still the more comfortable territory. And even when we initially agreed to go to prom together, it was as friends. Maybe what this means is that it felt really nice to have my old friend back. Someone who can know all that crap about me and see it, judge it, not as a boyfriend or a lover, but as a friend.

I have friends from college, I live with one of them. I also have a lot of new friends, New York friends. They’re great, and I love them. But they come and go. And there’s a lot about me they don’t know, things that they probably don’t actually care to know. Maybe what I needed was someone who had known me for just that long. Who knows my mom and remembers what my brother looked like before he got so tall and had facial hair and tattoos. It’s sort of like if Alice had found her best friend down there in Wonderland. Wouldn’t that have been even nicer than a Cheshire Cat?

Now whether or not he could stomach all of the new baggage I’ve accumulated in the last seven years remains to be seen. Something tells me he could handle it, it’s no worse than the old stuff. But I’m not sure he’ll get the chance. And as we were very practical children, we remain practical adults. No emotional spears have been lanced. Nobody’s getting on any planes. But one thing I do know: just like the summer of 2005, I did not want him to leave.