Forever Alone | Chapter 2: Proms & Palpitations (Part 1)
In which my teenage dreams swell to the highest heights and burst spectacularly, I learn to date boys I’m not into, and I mistake depression for love.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
It’s a humid night in the dead of summer. I’m in the front passenger seat of a black jeep, music blasting and cruising with the windows down, warm air whipping through my hair. Is there anything quite like being 17—tan legs, jean miniskirt, dirty blonde hair, freckles—rolling around town, nowhere to be, with a boy who makes your heart ache?
Except this boy, Luke, is not my boyfriend. My actual boyfriend, Patrick, is on vacation with his family. I’ve managed to persuade myself that I do not, in fact, have feelings for this boy anymore. We’re friends. We’ve always been friends. That’s how he sees me. It’s better this way.
But my heart … it’s way happier perched in that jeep than it should be, for a girl allegedly content with someone else.
In hindsight, it’s hard to know what was real and what was teenage hormones. But I can assure you that, at 14, I very much knew I was in love with Luke. I caught a glimpse of him in the hallway of our brand-new high school, and I was done—I felt just like all those books and movies I’d been inhaling promised me I would.
Actually, saying “I knew” I loved him isn’t quite right, because that would imply I thought about it at all. I didn’t. All I did was viscerally feel. He existed, and I felt—giddy, breathless, punched in the chest—and that was that. My body was in charge, and my mind was just along for the ride.
Though, intellectually, I could certainly have told you why I loved Luke: He was smart, funny, handsome, and endearingly weird. He had hair and eyes normally designated for girls, without looking feminine. He was an all-star wrestler with a body years beyond what a normal 15-year-old was packing. He was far more sensitive than he let on, but if you knew him well enough, he’d drop his guard and open up a little.
He was also the rare athlete into art and music. When I found out he’d gotten into one of the exclusive performance groups in our school, I physically ached to be in it. And when one of the girls in the group dropped out, guess who managed to snag that spot?
That’s how he evolved from someone I was infatuated with from afar to someone I actually befriended, up close. We had classes together, of course, but we spent a lot of time in our performance group—during school, in the evenings, on field trips.
And then, because the Universe loved me, or wanted to torture me, or maybe both, our sophomore year the powers that be shuffled everyone’s lockers around, and ours ended up side-by-side. Actually, for a while there was one guy in between us, but my desire to be right next to Luke was so strong that that guy literally ended up transferring out of our school. And then, voila, locker mates. For three glorious years.
Waking up before dawn to get ready for school was a drag, but knowing who’d be at my locker every day, multiple times a day, was a real motivator. And don’t worry, I absolutely milked the opportunity for flirtation. I’d long since memorized his locker combination, and would often open it when he wasn’t looking and steal the Gatorade he stacked on the top shelf. He, of course, would try to grab it back while I kept it out of reach, or punish me by bumping me out of the way with his hip, shutting my locker door before I was done grabbing my stuff, and strolling away.
Our very handsy antics did not go unnoticed. We regularly got comments from the older kids in our group that the two of us would end up married one day. We’d always laugh awkwardly and avoid eye contact when we heard that, and I could never decide whether I was deeply mortified or radiantly joyous.
My young life peaked at 15, during a long bus trip to a competition our group was performing in. He sat down—on my lap—and asked if I’d give him a back massage. I still remember the exact shade of his light grey t-shirt, and the scent of his Ralph Lauren cologne. I’d gotten to nudge him and play fight with him, but this level of prolonged, body to body connection—getting to explore his incredibly toned back at my leisure—I almost combusted. A close second was the time, a year later, when I knocked on his hotel room door during another school trip, and he opened the door shirtless, beads of water still running down his abs after a shower.
During study hall he’d let me copy off his chemistry homework—I was hopeless when it came to chemistry—and I’d let him borrow my iPod Nano and watch him lip sync all the verses of Stacy’s Mom by Fountains of Wayne. Sometimes we’d listen together, heads bent close, one headphone in each of our ears.
And yet … I was never entirely sure how he felt about me. Once, on Valentine’s Day, he gave a handful of his closest female friends lotions and body sprays from Victoria’s Secret. Everyone got a different scent, and mine was Secret Crush. I went home and fell on my bed, clutching my chest, hoping it was a profession of love. Even though, for all I know, one of the other girls was in her room, doing the same thing over Love Spell.
Another time, when he was turning 16, his mom asked one of his other close friends, Layla, who often babysit for his younger siblings, if she and I would plan a birthday party for him. Until then I had no idea his mom knew I existed … which means he must have been talking about me at home.
In the 1995 movie version of Sense & Sensibility Marianne, played by Kate Winslet, tells her older sister, Eleanor, played by Emma Thompson, that Willoughby—the scoundrel who broke Marianne’s heart— “Never actually told me he loved me. But it was every day implied!”
That was me and Luke: Every day implied … for almost 3 years. It seems ridiculous now, but in all that time it never occurred to me that it was an option to tell him how I felt. The stakes were far too high—how could I have shown my face at school, let alone continued performing in our group or going to my damn locker—if he knew how I felt, but didn’t feel the same way about me? It suited me better to let my longing quietly eat away at me from the inside, but outwardly preserve my dignity. And besides, every book I’d read and movie I watched had assured me that if a man loved you, he’d let you know.
And Luke … he never let me know. But he might as well have, because he broke my heart anyway when he started dating her.
She was Kyleigh, a girl he’d met through friends at another school. My friend Catherine, blissfully unaware of the pain she was about to inflict, casually asked one morning before class started, “Ugh, did you hear about Luke and that girl? Layla told me they made out at her house for like two hours.”
You know that thing you see in movies sometimes, when a character is about to pass out or get sick? You see them through what feels like a long tunnel, and the sound gets slow and obscure, and the screen fades in and out. Yeah, that. I don’t know how I managed to function well enough to make it to chemistry class after Catherine dropped that bomb. But twenty minutes later, I found myself bent over my binder, pretending to take notes, trying and failing to hide the tears streaming down my face.
It really did not help that Luke sat in the desk immediately behind mine during chemistry. It also didn’t help that my best friend, Mackenzie, had randomly not shown up for class that morning. I was without emotional backup, inches away from the boy who’d just inadvertently shattered my teenage dreams, breathing through nausea and fighting every animal instinct urging me to run away, curl up in a hole somewhere, and let myself come apart.
As far as first heartbreaks go, it sounds lamer than some. A boy I never even kissed—how bad could that have been? Sometimes I think that it might have been better if we had kissed or gotten the chance to date for the requisite three or four weeks that most teenagers average, and then inevitably broken up and moved on. But the fact that that hadn’t happened meant that my seemingly unrequited love for him had had 3 years to crescendo—a lifetime, when you’re 16.
And he wasn’t just a cute boy I had a crush on from afar. He was a good friend—someone I genuinely liked as a human. I knew him. How I felt was intense and maybe over the top, but it was also sincere and pure. My feelings had roots, and it hurt like hell when they got so unexpectedly ripped out.
So … why is a grown-ass woman lingering so much on something that happened with a boy literally half my lifetime ago?
Because the first time anything happens to you, it tends to leave an impression. For me, it was less of an “impression” and more of a crater. It slammed into me and fundamentally changed the landscape of how I saw myself. Long, long after I ceased to have any feelings for Luke another than a vague, nostalgic fondness—even years after Luke and I became adults and drifted apart—I was ruled by the story I told myself after he broke my heart.
This was Chapter 2: Part 1 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 2: Part 2!