Dance Me to the End Of Love

The sun is shining. The whole world is brand new. I am 15 and I am in love for the first time but I don't even know it. All I know is that I have this feeling in my stomach whenever he's around. All I know is that the sound of his voice gives me goosebumps. He says my name like he invented it. And his smell. When it's raining and we're outside swim team practice waiting for our parents to pick us up I stand under his umbrella with him and being that close to him is intoxicating. He wears Brut deodorant and it wafts off of him like the most powerful aphrodesiac I have ever experienced in my young life.

He wasn't my first kiss but he may as well have been. Because after that kiss my entire life changed. I was his the moment our eyes met in the downstairs of the Steerbarn during a teen-dance. But after that kiss he owned me. I was his prisoner. I was addicted, obsessed, enslaved, in love. We became inseparable. We spent hours on the phone talking about everything and nothing. Minutae half the time but it was the first time I had someone who fullfilled every need. He was a one-stop shop. He was my best friend; I could tell him everything, be everything in front of him and be attracted to him and him to me. We were comfortable in front of each other. Before he told me he loved me, as a preview I guess, he told me that you know when you are in love with someone when you can take a shit in front of them. And we could. And we did. There were no boundaries between us.

I was one of his friends in his group of friends. He was in my group of friends. Even there, we were accepted by our respective friends the way we accepted each other, unconditionally and unapoligetically and without boundaries. We were part of each other's groups. I had separate connections with his friends that didn't include him. His friends are some of the best friends I've ever had in my life. He had similar connections with my friends. I was him and he was me. We were a team. We were interchangeable. We were Briana and Brooklyn. I couldn't ever tell where I ended and he began. We had our own language and our own routines. I'd call him and he'd say hello and I'd say hi. Then he'd say, "who's this?" And I'd always answer, "your worst nightmare." Every time I called.

There is something about first love that never gets replicated. It's like how my dad talks about his local pizza place as a kid and how it was the best pizza to this day that he's ever had. I wonder if he was subject to a blind pizza taste test with all of the reknown pizzarias submitting slices whether he'd pick the slice from growing up. I think he believes it was the best pizza because it was the first pizza and he had it when he was experiencing every other first in his life and all of the firsts are the best. It's the nostalgia factor borne of wonder.

When Brooklyn and I broke up I knew that I'd never feel that way again; I couldn't envision ever being with anyone else and being in love. When Illinois and I broke up I knew I would. It was almost like despite how despondent I was and the despair over the dire turn my life had taken after Illinois, I already knew the drill; I would eventually fall in love with some other dude and maybe it would work out and maybe it wouldn't but it was all old hat by then. Not at all like it was with Brooklyn. With Brooklyn, the first time we broke up was in November of 1995, days before Thanksgiving. It was excruciating. I was living in Boston at the time. He was living in the School of Visual Arts dorm on 23rd street. I came home for Thanksgiving. On the Friday night that I arrived we bought a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a pack of Marlboros and sat at his card table across from each other. By the end of the bottle we were going down from the 9th floor, his floor to the 6th floor for him to introduce me to Long Island Lolita, this girl he was 'supposedly' just friends with, even though they sometimes slept in the same bed. He assured me that nothing had ever happened that they were just friends and that she'd love to meet me because he talks so much about me. We get to her room. They are friendly and comfortable and I sense something I don't like. They are too friendly and too comfortable and then I notice his pajamas folded up on her bookshelf. That is all I need to see to confirm what my instincts have been telling me since the first time he mentioned her name. I walk out of the room and wait for the elevator. He follows me. We are wasted. In the elevator we run into a friend of Brooklyn's who's tripping on acid and says, "you guys look like separate people. You always looked like a unit, like one mind and now you don't." And that's how I felt, naked and cold and missing a limb. I took the elevator to the lobby and ran outside crying hysterically in the night arriving at Madison Square Park, no coat, no cigarettes, no ID, no wallet, not even a quarter to make a phone call. Just me and my pain. I squatted down and peed in the park, crying and crying.

Eventually I made my way back to his room. His roommate was there. We went to the staircase to continue our conversation. It was awful. It was sad and pathetic and painful and gut-wrenching and I truly didn't believe I could exist in this world without him by my side. That conversation in the staircase marked the first and only time I ever saw him cry. We went back to his room. He slept. I cried all night. As soon as I woke up I called my parents. My dad answered. I asked my dad to come and pick me up. He said, "don't you have the car, didn't you drive there?" "Yes," I explained, "but something bad happened and I can't drive right now." "Are you pregnant?" he asked. "No, even worse. Me and Brooklyn broke up." My dad sighed with relief and said he was on his way. That night I slept in between my parents in their bed.

I fell in love with Brooklyn the instant I locked eyes with him at that dance. It was July 13, 1990. Our first kiss was July 29, 1990. He told me he loved me the summer of 1994, the night of the OJ chase. Our relationship was turbulent but our love was strong. We were both passionate and lived life to the fullest yet acted our ages, which meant that we often said and did things that were hurtful to the other, we were reckless and didn't understand the work that must go into sustaining a relationship. We were experimental, adventurous and artistic. We couldn't stay away from each other. After our break-up that Thanksgiving, we decided to not see each other or speak for one month. As soon as we saw each other again, we were catapulted immediately back into our old routine of late-night phone calls, the play by play of our days, telling each other everything our friends had told us in private, making plans for the next day, seeing each other as often as possible. Yet it wasn't for ages that he acknowledged me as his girlfriend again. Once he did, we confessed to eachother who else we had fooled around with during the time we were 'unofficial.' We had talked and talked about the Long Island Lolita ad nauseum. I finally had come to terms with the fact that nothing happened. It had been years and his story hadn't changed and I had no proof besides my gut feeling.

In our big confessional, I told him who I hooked up with and he surprisingly didn't take it too badly. Then I asked him. His answer, "Long Island Lolita." I laughed, "No really, who? Anyone?" He said, "Yeah, Long Island Lolita." "Okay, whatever, if that's all you got, let's go to bed," I responded and we did. When we woke up in the morning, he exclaimed that, "I can't believe how well you took that." "What?" I asked. "You know, that I slept with Long Island Lolita." "WHAT?!!!!! I thought you were joking." And then ensued a very long conversation I won't bore you with where I insisted on knowing everything from time of day, how many times it happened, what precipitated it, what positions etc.

This isn't a 'trust your gut' story even though it kind of is. It's a story about young love, first love, how you don't know what you're doing but you put everything you have into it. You are able to do that because you have no clue how much you stand to lose and how searing that pain is, how only for the first 5 seconds when you wake up in the morning are you without it, until it hits all over again and you spend the whole day in a fog until you finally fall asleep and you get that precious 5 seconds of normalcy the next morning until it hits you all over again. After the pain of losing, it is near impossible to ever throw your cards all out ever again. But that's what I want. I don't want to play it safe like I have been ever since Brooklyn. I want to risk everything. But this time I want to risk everything and win.