Romance.
The most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me came about when I was in high school. I had made out with token super-tall-stoned-boy Eli and we had turned into kind of a thing. A making out (while he’s stoned) talking on the phone (while he’s high) and walking home from the bus stop together (while he’s tripping balls) kind of thing. This had to be around 10th grade. (Full disclosure: I was an odd odd oddball of a 10th grader. I’d just started growing my hair out and hadn’t figured out dreadlocks, I was petrified of everyone and spent all my free time at school knitting at my locker and eating tuna fish.) Our make-out sessions were brief but our phone conversations – as was the style at the time – were EPIC. Hours and hours of breathing, detailing everything in our respective rooms, more breathing, relating in minute detail the days activities – you know, REAL GROWN-UP STUFF.
We were around 10 minutes into one such conversation (SPOILER ALERT: our last!) when it took a dark turn and he got more and more morose. Wondering aloud what the point of life was, talking about how depressed he was, I’m sure playing some Nine Inch Nails or sad Morrissey in the background. In addition to being an odd odd oddball at this age I was also prone to – how shall we put this delicately – crazy, so I have no doubt that I was solicitous and generous as he battled his upper-middle-class-three-bedroom-house-no-curfew-all-the-reefer-he-could-smoke-skateboarding-the-days-away demons. After who knows how long, the conversation escalated and he ended up yelling something along the lines of “I just can’t take it anymore!” And then there was a tinny- gunshot and a protracted thud. His brother then got into the act by screaming directly into the mouthpiece “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! He shot himself! He shot himself!”, and then gently placing the phone back onto the cradle, hanging up on me for the last time.
