She Likes Purple

First love

Kader asked, Who was your first love? How did it end? Are you still in touch?

**

I first saw him in my freshman Biology class, wearing a red polo shirt. I used to walk by his desk to turn in papers or ask questions in hopes he'd look at me, which he never did. When we ended up at the same party the next year, he finally looked. That was all it took. 

We were a wrong fit from the start, although when you're 15 and in love for the first time, you hold on for dear life even if you know you're holding on to the wrong thing. There was a lot of yelling, I remember that well, but how many teenagers know how to resolve conflicts maturely and discuss issues openly? So, a lot of yelling, insecurities, mind games, slammed car doors. It wasn't all bad, though.

Once, he wrote a paper in some class about his role model, and he filled two entire pages even though the exercise only asked for one. His mom showed it to me weeks later because he had written that paper about me. He wrote about what he liked most about me, what he admired, how he appreciated all I did for him. He said the very best things you can hope to hear at such a young age, things he so rarely said to me. 

We officially broke up over one stupid fight, but we'd continue to hurt each other for months, years even on some scale. He made me crazy, and I think I made him sad. We were a wrong fit from the start, but we slammed into each for years trying to make it work.

It never did.

I don't know where that paper he wrote me ended up, probably torn to pieces in some angst-filled fit. I don't think of him often, truth be told, and I'd be pretty stunned if he ever thought of me, but when he does cross my mind, I always always always hope he's met someone who's a good fit, who doesn't try to crawl out of her skin to be the person she thinks he wants her to be, who inspires him everyday to be the person he was when he wrote me that paper.

**

(I wrote a little more about him here and here and here.)

Timeline: Twenty-two

(To catch up: One Through Six, Seven And Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve And Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen and Twenty and Twenty-One.)

2004, aged twenty-two

Natalie and I are in California, ringing in the new year with a thrilling game of Cranium. My phone rings around 10 p.m. and Mike is on the other end ringing in his own new year. I haven't heard from him since early December when we had one night of flirting and kissing and many strong drinks. He's drunk in Texas, and he loudly wishes me a happy new year. We're off the phone before I even realize I'm glad he called. Ten days later, I'm back in Texas, and I drive up to Fort Worth to see Crystal off to Connecticut where she's taken a job. We're out to dinner at On the Border when Mike walks in, late and in a hurry. He slides in next to me and something clicks again. The next day we spend together, from morning to night, before we officially say goodbye to the friend who introduced us. We go to breakfast, we go to the movies, we drive around, and as we're making dinner plans, Mike suggests we all go to his aunt's house for a BBQ. I meet his parents on the day that will become our anniversary, and I love them instantly.

Mike and I make plans to see one another back in College Station, and so a few days later when I return to town, he invites me over to watch a movie and to drink some wine and that, my friends, is that. There is no official first date, no real talk about where we are and what we want. We just become this thing and although it's as confusing as all things are at the beginning, we spend a lot of time together. I am neglecting school and friends and work to take walks and eat greasy food and drink wine on his couch with him, and I won't be proud of all that neglect in hindsight, but some of the most beautiful memories of my life stemmed from it, so I have to believe everything worked out just as it was supposed to. 

In mid-July we travel to St. Louis together for our six-month anniversary. (I wrote a little about that trip here.) We've already traveled together, we've already exchanged "I love you's" and we've already become somewhat serious, but this trip is exquisite in that I begin to believe in us. You hear it all the time, that this person meets that person and they both "just know." It simply wasn't like that for Mike and me and that may be in part because -- at the beginning -- I didn't have the ability to trust in much. Our love took time to grow and our bond was built over laughter and good food and fun travels, not over one knowing look. Our lives begin to intertwine, on this trip especially, and where our futures used to be talked about in drastically different directions, they now start to head in the same one.

That summer, Mike and I hit more pot holes and fall more in love, I say goodbye to friends who graduate and move on -- friends who are still hurt by my semester spent more or less ignoring them, but friends who have since forgiven me, thank god. Come September I take a job -- for my last year in College Station and in school -- as an assistant preschool teacher. I work every day from 7-11 a.m. and it's exhausting, and I never make it out of bed in time to look all that presentable, but it's one of the best jobs of my life. I occasionally count down the hours to quitting time because the kids are being especially loud or cleaning up after the art project is especially boring, but when I look back on teaching those 11 kids, my heart still bursts. 

Everything changes this year. I go from a single, bar-loving girl who had all the time in the world for her friends and her own needs to a girl in love for the first time in a long time, and for the first time, period, with someone worthwhile. I lost things and gained things, I sacrificed things and took advantage of other things, I found myself even though it took some time to recognize the reflection. I had a very cool, very fun life before, and this is the year I began sharing it. 

Timeline: Twenty-One

(First: One Through Six, Seven And Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve And Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen and Twenty.)

2003, aged twenty-one

I turn twenty-one at one of my favorite restaurants, surrounded by friends and family. I sip on a raspberry margarita before my friends whisk me off to local bars to down strong shots and mugs of sangria. Late in the night, I drunkenly attempt to play pool, and I knock a ball off the table and into the leg of a bar patron. This woman starts screeching at me that she's a dancer, and I could have ended her career just then, when she was standing in a BAR and someone acted DRUNK. HOW COULD THAT HAVE HAPPENED?! All I could think to stammer out to this annoying dancer was, "But it's my 21st birthday." As if maiming someone should be totally excused on such a day. (Note: I kind of think it should.)

I imagine now is as good a time as any to tell this next story (mom, avert your eyes), the story of my Valentine's date from 2003. I meet him at a bar the night of February 13. We hit it off, or at least that's what the cheap Long Island Iced teas tell me. He asks for my number and says, "Let's get together tomorrow night, forget that it's Valentine's and just have fun." I love this idea, even more so when he calls the next afternoon to make plans. I suggest watching a movie at his place, and that's what we do. I can't remember the movie, not all these years later, but I do remember—quite clearly—the moment he turns to me—as I sit on his living room couch—and asks, "So, do you want to take off your shirt now?" There is a moment I sit there in silence, and maybe he thinks I'm considering his question, but really I'm considering the possibility that he could be certifiably insane. I tell him I'm going to keep my shirt on, thanks for the suggestion and all, and then I yawn and look at the clock and, wow, is it getting late. He does walk me to my car, what a fucking gentleman, and there he continues to charm the hell out of me by saying, "I may call you, but I probably won't."

The rest of the school year marches on, and it's kind of a hard semester for me. I'm meeting really wrong-for-me men (obviously), and I'm making kind of horrible-for-me choices. There are many nights I feel lost, scattered, scared and, when I look back now, like a 21-year-old. I'm normal, I know now, but I sure as hell didn't know it then. I wish I could go back and tell that girl to calm down. It'll be fine, I want to say. Just breathe. It turns out fine anyway, thankfully.

Towards the beginning of summer, we throw an engagement party for Crystal, and we gather at El Chico for a margarita-filled afternoon of celebrating. Mike, my now-husband and my then-nothing, comes to the party, of course, because he's one of Crystal's closest friends. He comes with his then-girlfriend and my now-friend, and we sit at opposite sides of the table. I don't say more than hello to either of them, and it's not until less than a year later how odd I'll look back on that day to be. "You were just down the table," I'll say to him one day as we hold hands. "And all I could think about were my fajitas."

That summer I move into a duplex with Lauren where life calms down in a lot of ways and gets even crazier in others. She and I go grocery shopping and cook dinner together and although our friendship will go through the wringer the next semester, I have very good memories from living with her. I have great memories from that summer.

My senior year begins and with it a goal to go out as many nights as possible with Cherie. We have so much fun, at football games and on Northgate, and one night after a few too many apple martinis, we begin talking to a group of people with a cop standing nearby. One of the guys in the group says to Cherie, "You know, you're drunk enough that that cop could totally arrest you," and Cherie, without missing a beat, looks at the cop and smiles and says, "Do you want to arrest me?" It's what I love about Cherie, what everyone loves about Cherie, that she's fearless and fun and you could never hold anything against her for very long.

That December I organize an event for the seniors in my sorority. We wine taste at Messina Hof and then head back to Cherie's house for food and more wine and some of the best conversation I've ever had. Crystal happens to be in town this weekend, for her birthday, and later that night—after the wine and food and conversation—Cherie and I head to Northgate to see her, to help her celebrate turning 23. I am wearing a borrowed (and totally fantastic) black velvet blazer from Natalie—a blazer I will drunkenly lose later that night—and when Cherie and I walk into Madhatter's we see Crystal and a few of her friends already there. Yep, there's Mike, sitting on the couch with a beer in hand. He says to me as I walk up, "You look nice," and my heart skips a beat, which (holy shit) I was not expecting. Where did that reaction come from? I'm still not sure. I've told the story of this night a million times before—before on this site, even—and I don't know how to tell it any differently, except to say that I realize now a lot had to go into making that night come together, and in hindsight I know that at that point Mike and I had very few chances ahead of us (and like a million behind us) to be in the same room, on the same night. He was single, and I was in a better place than I'd been for much of the past year. I was laughing when I walked up, I remember that, and I don't know if he had ever really seen me laugh before. Something clicked that had never clicked before, that much both of us knew.

The next day we all went to lunch to say goodbye to Crystal, and Mike kept trying to make eye contact with me, but I was too nervous, too weird, and I couldn't bring myself to act like a normal human being around him. I couldn't leave fast enough, so I could actually take a breath, and I didn't hear from him for the rest of the year. I started dating someone else. When Natalie asks about Mike during the trip she and I took to California for Christmas, I tell her I just don't think we make much sense together, and I meant that. I thought, on paper, we were all wrong.

But when I drive around our small college town, I find myself looking for his car.

Timeline: Twenty

(Here are the others: One Through Six, Seven And Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve And Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen.)

2002, aged twenty
(Note: If I haven't mentioned this as of yet, I'm lucky in that my birthday falls at the very beginning of the year so for 99.9% of each year I am the same age, making it fairly easy for me to write these posts. Well, easy in terms of remembering not as easy in terms of ripping off long-ago-healed wounds.)

I turn 20 at a Cheddars in Plano, Texas. Lauren has joined me there to celebrate my birthday and it's the last stop on a Texas tour that took the two of us through Houston and then to San Antonio and onto Austin for various college-minded reasons. (Read: to drink and see boys.)

Now that I'm a sophomore and that horribly anxious first year of college is behind me, I've fallen into a peaceful sort of routine. Studying for History tests and writing in blue books and walking to class in wrinkled T-shirts. Eating sandwiches in on-campus delis and going to date parties and still spending an insane amount of time with Lauren who has become this calming force in my life. I'm a bit all over the place, thinking of this and that and this again and whenever I walk into our shared sorority-house room, I instantly feel more at peace. It's the same now, when we meet for dinner or go to the movies---even though years have separated then and now and a lot of growing pains have, as well---whenever I see her, I feel just that much more at ease. She has that way about her and when you're twenty (or fifty, I imagine) that's a beautiful kind of friend to have around.

That summer I find a job nannying two boys, aged ten and seven. I cart them to tennis lessons and for snow-cones, but mostly I stay out of their way while they reenact Spongebob and swim in their pool. I also take them to McDonalds far more often than I should and since my lunch is on their parents tab, I eat far too many orders of fries than I should. Thankfully I'm working out regularly---for the first and, possibly, only summer of my life---and it makes for a really calm, nice summer, that routine of mine. I don't know if all college students will agree with me, but there's something about the stillness of campus or the emptied-out streets or what, but summers were always my favorite time of year in College Station. When I think back on college I'm first brought back to the football games and I'm next pulled back to the summers. As miserably hot as they were, they were good to me.

I leave a few weeks into my junior year for my sister's wedding in Toronto. She's a stunning bride and it's surreal to watch her get married. Right before we're to go down the aisle my nine-year-old brother pulls me aside and tells me he's nervous that he'll drop his ring-bearer pillow. I lean down and hug him and tell him if he does to look at me. The photographer, somehow, captured the moment and it's still (to this day) my favorite picture---with me hugging my little brother on our sister's wedding day. I dance with my dad to "Unchained Melodies" and toast to the happy couple, pausing to thank Canada for their drinking laws.

In October we have an out-of-town date party---on a party boat on Lake Travis---and I go with Cherie and Crystal and Lauren and everyone's respective dates. Crystal has paired up a redheaded friend of hers with one of our other sorority sisters and I notice him as we sit across the bus from each other. I listen to him talk to everyone and tell Crystal how much fun he's having, and all I can think---not that he's cute or seems fun---is that he's all wrong for the girl Crystal paired him with. That's the first thought I had of my future husband, "I wonder who will warn that poor guy about her." Not love at first sight, no, but it is the first night I meet Mike. October 11, 2002.

Timeline: Nineteen

(The rest of the ages: One Through Six, Seven And Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve And Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen and Eighteen.)

2001, aged nineteen
I spend the holiday break moving my sister from California to Seattle with my dad, step-mom and eight-year-old little brother. We take two cars up to Washington and my sister, dad and I are in one. We take turns choosing the music and we groan our way through the others' selections and we give my dad a hard time about all the things he insists on pointing out to us--"Look at that rock right there! Have you ever seen a rock so ... round ... before? Oh, wait, is that a bluejay? We stop in Eugene, Oregon and in the middle of an Outback Steakhouse my little brother lets it slip that I have a tattoo. My dad is surprisingly calm about it and will tell me later--after catching a glimpse of it, for the first time--that it's kind of nice. I stay with my sister in her new apartment when we arrive in Seattle, and because of the eating disorder I still can't quite shake, I end up spending a night in the emergency room with what the doctors tell me is a slight esophageal rupture. I don't think anyone knows what to do with me except wring their hands and worry.

Back at school, Natalie and I begin spending a lot of time together--driving to Houston to see movies, going to bars to watch Texas Country artists play, eating lunch on campus--and through her I meet a guy who is funny and cute, in a kind of awkward way. He's a good guy, though, and I like him. He makes me feel safe and wanted and hopeful. He leaves a rose for me on the seat of his car and gives me a nickname. We whisper a lot of drunken promises to each other, and I think to myself, This is going somewhere, this crazy little unexpected relationship. But one night as I'm reading on his bed, I look over to see him at his computer, IMing a friend of mine. It sort of strikes me as odd--when did they exchange screen names?--but I don't think too much of it, he's making friends with my friends, I think, along with more spinning we sometimes do to convince ourselves our gut is wrong. And then one day soon thereafter he breaks up with me, and I ask him if it's because of her. And it is. Natalie got me through that time, writing me funny e-mails and glaring at him whenever she could. In the end it was fine, he wasn't the guy for me, it all worked out, I moved along and as everyone learns at one point in life your gut is so rarely, rarely wrong.

After a summer at home, exhaustedly working at a daycare center every day, I return to school and move into my sorority house, where I still don't know a single person all that well. I move into a room with a girl named Lauren and two other girls. Lauren and I start hanging out, driving to McDonald's and Fazoli's and going to Aggie football games together. About two weeks into the school year, I walk out of my American History class and wait for the bus to take me back to the house for a much-needed nap. As I stand there a girl is crying hysterically, screaming for a cellphone. As we pile onto the bus, there's a newscast streaming from the radio, and it takes the entire ride home to realize what has happened across the country while I had been jotting notes on The Great Depression. I pick Lauren up from class later that day, and we visit her parents; it's her mom's birthday--September 11--and my sister's is two days later. As you probably know--as you can probably remember--it takes a long while before anyone feels much like celebrating.

Through all the chaos and confusion of my second year of college and of that particular time for our country, I have found a great friend in Lauren. A friend who stays out late with me, sneaking gulps of raspberry vodka outside of smoky Texas bars; a friend who lets me borrow her shoes even though I don't take excellent care of them; a friend who stays up all night talking with me about the guys we're seeing--they are all nuts this year, aren't they Lauren?--and a friend who encourages me to run for our sorority council, a sorority I wasn't even sure I felt a part of just months before. But I decide to run. And I make it. (I should probably mention I ran unattested, shouldn't I? Fine, I ran unattested, but there was still work involved! It wasn't so easy! I swear it!)

Lauren and I are now on council together, and we are joined by a handful of other great, smart, funny women. Our president is Crystal. Cherie is our VP of Marketing. We couldn't have known it back then, when we all sat down in an alum's house to learn the ropes of our new positions; we couldn't have known that we were sitting across the room from our future bridesmaids, from the women we'd go through devastating breakups with, health crises and failed classes, women we'd hang on tightly to and cry with and huddle up to watch Oprah or The Bachelor with and travel to Mexico and Vegas and Tahoe with and women we'd end up celebrating the highest highs and the lowest lows with. We couldn't have known we were just beginning friendships that would go on to last the next seven years. And would then go on to last a lifetime after that.

Timeline: Eighteen

(To catch up: One Through Six, Seven And Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve And Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen, Sixteen and Seventeen.)

2000, aged eighteen
After a ridiculously fun surprise party for my eighteenth birthday, I head back to school to finish the last semester of high school. I walk into my Government class on the first day of second semester, and Natalie is there. It's the first class we have together since freshman year. For the rest of the semester I'll steal glances at her binder, which is covered in pictures of her and her then-boyfriend. We make eye contact every once in a while.

On March 30, 2000, I get a rejection letter from Texas A&M. I've been wait-listed, but chances aren't good for late admission as this year they received more applications than ever before. My chances are slim. The letter makes this clear.

I finish out my senior year with great friends, wonderful memories and a trip to Disney World to dance in a parade at one of the parks there.

Sometime, near the end of the semester, Natalie and I speak to each other for the first time since we were both 16. I don't remember what about, I don't remember who initiated the conversation, but, regardless, I muster the courage to ask her to sign my yearbook the last week of class. And she does. She wrote: I really have missed you, but I'm terribly proud of the battles that you have won in high school. I'm sorry for what has happened, but, hopefully, when we remember each other it will be positive. I re-read it nearly a thousand times over the next few months.

In late May, my dad, sister and other family and friends fly into town. I put on a black dress, a little extra makeup and I graduate from high school. It's incredibly bittersweet, as I walk across the stage 49th in my graduating class of 480. The top ten-percent of all graduating high school seniors in the state of Texas receive automatic admission to the state school of their choice. Texas A&M—a state school—is my choice. I cross the stage in the top 10.2 percent of my graduating class.

My mom and I fight a lot this summer, and it's because I'm going slightly crazy. Leaving high school is traumatic and terrifying, and I feel I'm leaving all the good behind me. We're in the middle of a particularly nasty, silence-filled fight when I check the mail one day to find a thick envelope from Texas A&M. I've been taken off the waiting list. I've been accepted. I call my mom, screaming and happily crying and laughing, too. The fight is over, and this is just how my mom is: the quickest to congratulate, the quickest to forgive, the only person in my life who is never anything but proud of me, no matter what I've done to her. We celebrate that night, and, finally, my future begins falling into place.

Before I leave for College Station, I write Natalie a letter. I say a lot of things in it, I imagine, but all I remember saying is this: I miss you. Because I really, really do. She is going to A&M, too. We both decided on the same school unbeknownst to one another. Regardless of who's going though—and I have a handful of other friends moving there, as well—I stand on my front lawn the night before I am set to leave, and I break down. I've changed my mind. I don't want to go. I think I'll just stay right here, instead, thank you very much. Two friends talk me off the metaphorical ledge, and I wake up insanely early the next day—my hands shaking from the word go—and drive into College Station, Texas, a town where more than two-thirds of the residents are students at the university. I try and take everything in, try to envision eating at restaurants we're passing, shopping at little stores dotted along the main drag in town. But I just can't believe this is my home now. It feels so foreign, so unfamiliar to me. I wouldn't have believed a single person if they had told me that in five years, almost to the day, I would cry hysterically—feeling my heart shatter in my chest—as I drive out of that town, desperate to stay for one more day, one more hour even.

I start my first semester of  college—I take Zoology, Sociology, Political Science and History—I join a sorority, I make new friends on my co-ed floor, I begin drinking a little (fine, a lot), I go to football games, I actually date—for what feels like five minutes—someone I had a huge crush on in high school and he takes me to my first Midnight Yell. One sort of crazy, messy night after that boy broke up with me, I walk next door to a local tattoo parlor and get a daisy tattooed on my lower back. I don't hate it, when I catch a glimpse of it now, although it's been almost eight years and I was absolutely certain I'd come to regret it by now. But, actually, it reminds me of that girl from way back when, a girl I think I'd kind of love if I met now—dramatic, deep, scared, fun, insane, desperate, hopeful. She was also ballsy, even though she didn't know it, and these days, when I get out of the shower and see that flower on my back, I always smile and think of her. Even though it's faded and not really my style, it reminds me that I was 18 once. And I wasn't half bad.

In between getting my heart smashed by that boy and drinking far too many Keystone Lights and awkwardly hanging around a sorority house I didn't feel a part of yet and studying far less than I should have (first college test score: 52) and also just plain falling in love with every corner of that town, I spend a lot of time in my room, browsing the Internet, illegally downloading music and chatting with friends on Instant Messenger. One afternoon I get a call from the front lobby of my dorm. It's Natalie. She has stopped by for a visit. I can't tell you—there really aren't words—how good it is to see her. It has been far too long.

Timeline: Seventeen

(Wow, seventeen was quite the year. Sorry, ahead of time, for how many words I used to describe it.)

(And because linking seems appropriate for anyone who may be new—and thus confused—around here: One Through Six, Seven And Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve And Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen, Sixteen.)

1999, aged seventeen
It hits me as I'm sitting at a high school talent show one Thursday night in late January: I want to go to college, and I should really begin thinking about that. I buy a university resource book and place a dozen calls to colleges across the country requesting catalogs and as much free information as I can get.

One afternoon, in Spanish class, a friend asks a casual question about Jason. She asks how we're doing, and since we're doing fine, that's what I tell her. She then says, with a sincere smile, "You'll probably be one of those lucky girls who marry her high school sweetheart." And because it is what we've planned on, I smile. And then, an unexpected feeling overcomes me: I want out. I want to go to college and travel and he doesn't. I want a future beyond the city limits, and he doesn't. I feel like I have instantly grown out of us. Although I realize it didn't happen quite like that—it actually unfolds the way many things do in life: we push on and on and on until one day the weight of carrying this or that around becomes too much, and we have to put it down or it'll break us in half—it feels like I loved him one day and stopped the next.

The following day I do something I know will make him mad. I go to a party without him, while he's working. It makes me sick to think that this is what he breaks up with me over, but it makes me even sicker because I KNEW HE WOULD. He tells me not to go, he tells me I'll be sorry, he tells me he'll break up with me if I do. So I do. That night, at around midnight on February 12, 1999, he does, indeed, break up with me. Relief washes over me for a solid day before I slowly freak out. Wait, I think. What did I do?

Even though this is what I wanted, this is what I anticipated, I don't know who I am without him and it scares the shit out of me. So I decide I want him back. I spend the next month allowing him to treat me worse than he ever has before and will ever again. I beg him to take me back. I show up at his house uninvited. I call him repeatedly. I convince him to take me to our winter formal, which will go down as one of the worst nights of my life. A night I'll never forget. A night that makes me want to throw up, even now. That night should have been it. It should have been a clean break after that. But, lord, it wasn't. For another few weeks I continue to beg, to write him pathetic letters. I continue to lose weight.

And then, something happens. I am invited out by some girls on my drill team. They show me what high school should be like, with casual dinners and lots of laughter at things no one would find funny now. One night they bring me to one of their friend's houses—a guy—and for the first time in as long as I can remember I get butterflies. From that day on, I will never spend another moment on my proverbial knees, begging things of Jason, which makes him come running back into my life.

It's something I still laugh about, that the minute I developed feelings for someone else, he came rushing back in, ready to give it another go. He spent the next few months doing the calling, showing up uninvited, grabbing hold of me, territorially, in the hallway. And even though Jason wouldn't fully be out of my life for a while (we'd go through a million more shades of gray and we'd do our best to hurt each other another 4,000 times), I had taken one giant step forward. I had fallen for someone else. Someone who would spend the next few years trying to heal all the scars left behind by a too-intense love. Someone who would never fully love me back but who gave me all he could. Someone I still care for, am still close with.

Sometime in between letting go of my old ties and forming new ones, I decide to try out for an officer position on my drill team. It's a long shot—I am just a regular line member and hold no position—but it distracts me and gives me something new to focus on. I practice all day, every day. I walk around with a nervous stomach for weeks. Right before I am to walk out into the middle of the basketball court and dance the solo I choreographed to "Lucky" by Seven Mary Three in front of my entire team, a friend grabs hold of my arm and whispers to me, "Just dance." And this piece of advice is magical, and it's one I think back on often. When I'm nervous about a conference call, when I face another month of infertility, when my father lets me down, I find myself whispering to myself at all times of the day, "Just dance." It's the best piece of advice I've ever been given. And I do. I dance in front of my entire team, alone, and somehow—I still don't quite know how—I make it. I become an officer.

I spend the next few months—the rest of my junior year and the beginning of my senior one—dancing my way through all the pain. It's the most alive I have ever felt, dancing in the middle of stages and football fields and my living room, too. My new friendships grow stronger, my old life fades, and I am happy. It's new—this physical joy, all this laughter, all these things to look forward to. And, yet, I am still keeping secrets behind closed doors. I'm still skipping meals and lying. I'll continue to lie for years. I wish I could erase the memories from my mother's mind from that time, but I can't. I permanently damaged her while permanently damaging myself. You have to be a deeply selfish person if you choose an eating disorder, and during that time I was as selfish as I've ever been.

But all these years later, as I look back, I am still proud of this year. The year I shed things and figured out things and realized things and pieced myself back together and broke myself apart some more. Sometime in the middle of July of this year, my mom and dad took me around the country, touring my top-three college picks (one in coastal California, one in Georgia and one in small-town Texas). I began dreaming really grand dreams on that trip, while reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the back of my dad's rental car. I began seeing myself as a college student, and the excitement that began buzzing inside of me because of those thoughts was almost like a current.

One day, on that trip, I stepped inside the Memorial Student Center on the Texas A&M campus—right smack-dab in the middle of College Station, Texas. As I stood in the middle of the sweatshirt section, taking in all the maroon and white surrounding me, watching the students pick up scantrons and blue books before tests, I just knew. I turned to my mom, and said, "This is it. This is where I'm going to school." And I can't tell you why I made that decision. Why this liberal, California-born girl felt so comfortable on such a conservative campus, but from the ruins of a handful of very difficult, very painful coming-of-age years, rose a bright, hopeful future.

On that day, I had come home.

Timeline: Sixteen

(To catch you up to speed, here's One Through Six. Then Seven And Eight. Over here is Nine. Then Ten. Then Eleven. Then Twelve And Thirteen. And, finally Fourteen And Fifteen.)

1998, age sixteen
On my sixteenth birthday Jason shows up at my door, holding a balloon and peach roses. He asks me—in not so many words—to forgive him. And I do. Three weeks later, on his sixteenth birthday, he tells me he loves me while we watch a movie in his living room. I say it back because there is no other word I know to describe how he makes me feel and even though I look back now, ten years later, painfully aware of all the things that girl wasn't aware of, I still can't dispute that she was—without a doubt—in love with that boy.

That night as we laid on his couch—whispering to one another, entwined in front of the TV—my friendship with Natalie suddenly cracks down the middle. Before Monday morning parents will be called, tears will be shed, words will be screamed and as I pass her in the hall for the first time since our friendship-ending fight, we look coldly past one another. We say nothing. There is silence where there used to be notes and laughter. There is crackling animosity and anger where there used to be a comfortable sisterhood. 

She stops by my house twice over the next six months, worried about my obvious eating disorder the first time and about her own peace of mind the second, but both times it feels like there is too much damage to repair, too much betrayal to overlook. Even though I find myself driving down her street, looking for her in the hallway and thinking of her on her birthday, the silence becomes deafening. Natalie and I begin our separate lives.

Jason and I fall deeper in love and because we're sixteen and we have no clue what the hell we're doing, we begin to hurt one another. We scream, we throw things, I cry, we apologize, we grab hold of each other. We are intense and exhausting, and because I just don't know any better—because I am stupider than I have ever been or will ever be again—we talk about getting married. I make him practice asking me, and he buys me a promise ring we pick out together.

It's an unhealthy relationship—hindsight shows me that much—but it's not all bad. And when I peel back the hard parts, I remember swimming in his backyard on sticky summer nights and long, stolen kisses in my car. I remember wearing his jacket and playing with his little sister. I remember his old, sad Beagle—"Spike the Wonderdog"—and sitting at my first Aggie football game with his family, hot chocolate in hand. I remember eating Wendy's together after school and how he would drive to and from my dance classes with me, just so we could spend those extra thirty minutes together. As so many things go in life, it really was good before it was bad. It really was breathless and intoxicating before it was suffocating and scary.

In November, I join thirteen other drill-team members on a trip to New York City, to dance in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I'm not close with too many people on the team because I spend all my free time with Jason. But that week in New York City—dancing for hours in the ballroom of the Hilton and then exhaustedly exploring the city by ourselves while our twenty-something chaperons took shots in the hotel bar—was the best week of my life. The electricity, the excitement, the energy—everything about that city made me desire to see more. Something was roused in me that trip, and although I was still desperate to get back home to him, I wasn't as desperate as when I left. I mark that trip as the beginning of the end.

Timeline: Fourteen And Fifteen

(Ages "One Through Six" can be read here. Ages "Seven And Eight" here. Age "Nine" over here. Age "Ten" here. Age "Eleven" here. And, finally, ages "Twelve And Thirteen" here.)

1996, age fourteen
I wrap up eighth grade and head off to California for the summer. I baby-sit my way through my dad's neighborhood, so I can buy as many back-to-school clothes as possible for my freshman year of high school. At our freshman orientation, Natalie and I find out we have four classes together, including Debate, which will make standing in front of ridiculously critical upperclassmen and offering my point-of-view on such topics as the death penalty actually possible throughout that year.

High school officially starts and I wear a chocolate-brown dress on the first day. Natalie and I meet after every class, although we make new friends, too, through drill team and classes. We dance on the junior varsity drillteam every Thursday night at the JV games, and we wave our pompoms in the stands each Friday night, at the varsity games. As groups of middle-school friends fracture and fall apart (high school is a completely new battlefield and some people are rocketed to popular status and some people just aren't, as you probably remember), it seems to amaze everyone—Natalie and myself included—that she and I have managed to stay friends through all of the hard and awkward transitions. We're foolish to think we've dodged the ultimate bullet (starting high school) and that there won't be some serious obstacles up ahead for us.

This Christmas—December 1996—will be the last Christmas my mom, sister and I will spend living together and we celebrate by driving around, looking at lights, dancing in the street to the turned-up radio and laughing, just the three of us, which is something I will miss every day after my sister moves away, six months later.

1997, age fifteen
The night I turn 15, I'm in California for the second half of my holiday break. My step-mom has promised to take me driving around their neighborhood in the middle of the night—my first time behind the wheel. When she wakes me up, at 3am, she's positive I'll roll over and wave her away as I've always been a girl who loves her sleep, but I bolt out of bed and practically run to the car. Elece will tell the story for years to come—at my wedding reception even—of this night she teaches me to drive and how halfway through the tutorial I will turn to her and say, "Does your left foot ever stop hurting?" Confused she asks, "What do you mean?" "Well, it's kind of painful to hold your left foot up in the air until you need to press the break." (If she reads this, I know she'll snort out her coffee, just thinking about it.)

Sometime this spring, I decide to try out for the varsity drill team, even though Natalie has opted not to. And, somehow, I make it. I begin practices and over the summer I show up for drill team camp, which is miserable and seemingly never-ending and I swear I lose five pounds over those four long, treacherous days. Oh, and I also love every second of it.

My sister moves back to California over the summer, and I write a poem in my head to her in the back of my dad's van one hot afternoon. When I finally put pen to paper, I remember almost every line, and I send it to her in a card after hundreds and hundreds of miles and also hundreds and hundreds of regrets separate us. (We haven't lived in the same timezone since.)

As I start my sophomore year of high school, with hours of drill team practice and a new, shorter haircut, my mom tells me she's leaving me home for a weekend in late September to go on a church retreat. Since I'm a teenager and therefore equipped with awful decision-making skills, I decide to throw a small little party while she's away. Just a few close friends and a few illegally purchased bottles of Boone's. Natalie and I set about inviting a handful of people but, as most things go when you're fifteen, we weren't entirely prepared for what would happen that night. By the end of the party there ends up being quite a few people sleeping on my couch whom I have never met before. One particular uninvited guest was named Jason, a boy I had developed a crush on the year before in my biology class. He smelled like Tommy cologne and he walked kind of funny, limbering and heavy.

A week after that night—and after my mother totally found out about the party because it turned out I was awful at making decisions and lying—Jason stopped me in the hall outside of my history class and asked if he could call me sometime. My heart beat out of my chest for the next ten hours, until the phone rang, and a few days after that I went out on my first official, honest-to-goodness date, a date I forced Natalie to go on with me because I was more nervous than I had ever been. He also brought a friend. We saw The Game and then ate at Chili's, and we couldn't have known it then—we were far too starry-eyed and filled with buzzing excitement—but from then on our lives would never really be the same.

That Christmas I went back to California, anxious about leaving Jason for an entire week because, honestly, I didn't fully trust him. The day I got back to Texas, Natalie broke the news to me over the phone: my boyfriend of three months had cheated on me. That should have been it, and I hope if any 15-year-old girl is reading this and going through something similar it will be it for you (although I'm sure it won't be). But, I was so young and, for the first time, so in love with a boy who could change my mind/mood/day with just a look. I didn't talk to him for a week after our one and only "How could you do this to me?" conversation. I spent those seven days with my stomach twisted into roughly nine million knots, listening to the whiniest and saddest of songs.

I rang in 1998 at Natalie's house, watching The Fifth Element and crying softly into the pillows on her couch, just gut-wrenched over what he had done to me. My heart was unequivocally broken, and all these years later—more than ten, in fact—it's still an aching, physical pain I haven't forgotten.

Timeline: Twelve and Thirteen

(In case you need to catch up or would just like to waste a bit of your morning: One Through Six here. Seven And Eight here. Nine here. Ten here. And, oh, eleven is here.)

1994, age twelve
Natalie and I spend afternoons meandering around our neighborhood, walking by our crushes' houses and wearing out our fake Birkenstocks from Payless. Natalie's mom tells us to be home at a certain time, and when that time draws near, and we're not ready to head back, we turn one of our watches back twenty minutes and assume we can convince her the watch mysteriously broke.

One of those crushes whose house we walk slowly by is named Caleb, and we have English together. Word gets to him that I like him and word gets back to me that he likes me back, and he calls Natalie's house one afternoon to ask me out and he is officially my first boyfriend. A week or so later, we go to the movies to see Mrs. Doubtfire, and he holds my hand. The butterflies slamming around my stomach are new, and it's ridiculously hard for me to concentrate on the movie. He moves to Oklahoma a few weeks after that, and I never talk to him again.

That summer, I take Natalie to California for three weeks. We fight and go back-to-school shopping and have a water-gun match in my dad's backyard. My brother is a little over one-years-old, and he has the bluest eyes and the blondest hair, and I give him his bottle every morning.

1995, age thirteen
For my thirteenth birthday, three days into 1995, my step-mom takes me to Clothestime to get a birthday outfit and I pick out this purple pleather jacket I kind of wish I still had. That night, we go to Mel's Diner in San Francisco for dinner before my dad surprises me with tickets to see The Phantom of the Opera.

Back in Texas, I'm in the middle of seventh grade, and in my Texas History class I am moved around the room 13 times because Mrs. Dixon claims I am the "chattiest" student she's ever taught. When she moves me next to a boy named Scott we become best friends and for a few years we stay that way.

Natalie and I fill up spirals and spirals of notes, writing back and forth to each other with various nicknames and slang—talking about Scott and other boys and what we're going to do over the weekend. But as eighth grade kicks off Natalie and I have a horrible fight and we spend an entire month not talking. I hang out with the "cool crowd" that month, going to haunted houses and birthday parties and pretending I don't feel ridiculously out of place. But I do. I can't remember how or why or when, but Natalie and I make-up and I bow out of the crowd I never belonged in in the first place.

At home my sister is leading her own life, and she has boyfriends and a job and still—all these years later—the better hair of the two of us. Unlike me, she keeps her room spotlessly clean, and when she isn't home—even though I know she would kill me if she ever found out—I sneak into her room and listen to her CDs while sitting on her bed very careful not to mess up the comforter. One day she drops by my school, and I get a note from her during my Algebra class. It says, "I'll pick you up after school and we can 'cruise around'" And it's the only time she does this, but it means the world to me all the same.

Timeline: Eleven

("One Through Six" can be read here. "Seven Through Eight" here. "Nine" here. And "Ten" here.)

1993, age eleven
Over spring break, we fly out to California to visit my dad, and even though we're not hungry he immediately takes us to IHOP from the airport. It's there he tells us my step-mom is six-months pregnant with our little brother or sister. It dawns on me, perhaps not right away but eventually, that she was pregnant the first time we met her—three months before—and we had no idea.

Over Memorial weekend my brother, Adam, is born. This same weekend, during a trip to Tulsa to visit my grandpa, grandma and uncles, I am involved in a freak, random accident. My uncle accidentally hits me in the eye with a baseball bat, in a batting cage at a putt-putt place. I spend a week in the hospital and undergo surgery to rebuild my eye socket. To this day, there is no visible scar, and that's the third miracle of the situation. The first: I didn't lose my eye. The second: I didn't lose my vision. I will always have a few plastic plates in place of my eye socket, and I usually lead with this at parties.

When I'm well enough to travel, I fly out to California for the rest of the summer, and I hold my baby brother for the first time in the San Francisco airport. I spend the summer days with my step-mom, sister and brother, watching "Loving" and eating Otter Pops. I'm terrified of starting middle school in the fall, and one day as I walk with my dad down the streets of San Francisco, I begin to cry because I'm not sure how to use a locker. He listens and tells me these things work themselves out.

Sometime over the summer, back in Texas, my mom moves us into the house I will live in until the day I pack up everything I own and move to college, the house my mother still lives in.

I start middle school (sixth grade), and I somehow learn to use my locker. I have horrible hair this year, but I just can't figure out how to curl it or maintain it, so I wear a lot of headbands. I ride the bus home from school everyday. One day, about a week after school starts, I reach the bus late and find all the empty seats are taken. I ask a girl who I am sure is a seventh grader if I can sit next to her. She smiles and says yes. It turns out she's actually my age and her name is Natalie and she doesn't know a soul at this school either. We become inseparable and I spend so much time sitting at her kitchen counter, her parents joke about charging me rent.

Fourteen years later, she will stand beside me on my wedding day. A year after that—this May, actually—I will stand beside her at her own.

Timeline: Ten

(One Through Six can be read here. Seven Through Eight here. And Nine here.)

1992, aged ten
My dad has moved back to California, from Minnesota, and I begin to see him every Sunday. We go ice-skating, to the zoo, to the movies, for ice cream. He has moved into an apartment in Parkmerced and one afternoon we sit on his apartment stairs and he tells me he won't be living there alone. It was hard for him to tell me, but I already knew.

My mom, sister and I will move to Texas in the summer, and I can't remember when that was decided, but I do remember being excited. It's not that I wanted to leave California, and all three of us will physically miss it every day we're not there, but every inch of that city is laced with a raw, aching pain. And in a lot more ways than one we just couldn't afford to stay.

The day before we move, I am with my dad. We end the afternoon at a nearby basketball court and through thick tears he tells me he'll move to Texas to be near us, if I want him to. He tells me he would do anything if I wanted him to. I never could bring myself to ask that of him—throughout the next ten years—and not because I'm selfless or because I didn't want him living near me, but because I knew he'd have to break his promise if I asked, and it wasn't something either one of us would recover from.

We spend the next week on the road and arrive in Garland, Texas in the middle of July. It's tough, getting used to this new place, this new home. My sister and I start new schools and make new friends, and we get by. We are strong, the three of us, and we do what we must.

Christmas rolls around and we fly back to California for our first visit (of dozens) with my dad and Elece. She is bubbly and fun and nice, and we like her even though we don't want to. And we forgive him, even though we don't want to.

Because we're young and because we love him.

Timeline: Nine

("One Through Six" here. "Seven and Eight" here.) 

1991, age nine
My mom and dad sit us down, to tell us we're moving to Minnesota where my dad has gotten a job as the Twin Cities Marathon director. I call my best friend MacKay, as soon as I hear the news. My parents' friends throw us a going-away party out at Lake Merced and we dance and eat while we're buzzing with excited energy. My dad has to leave early for Minneapolis while we stay behind to sell the house and finish the school year. We'll join him in June, just a few short months away. We take him to the airport for a tearful but happy goodbye. For a few weeks, we regularly talk with him and during one call I ask him to tell me the name of the elementary school I'll attend. He can't think of it—he's scattered and distant—and my stomach drops although I'm not sure why. The calls eventually become less frequent, and my mom and sister become quieter. We've fixed up our little blue house. My mom has quit her job. We have it all planned.

I walk up the stairs one night, in early June, confused to find my sister cutting up pictures of my dad while sitting on the top step. Later my mom sits us down to tell us we're not moving to Minnesota, our dad isn't moving back to California, we're staying put for a while but everything—just everything—is changing. I cry and cry and cry as I bury my face in my mom's lap. I cry tears I can still feel. My dad calls the next day to ask if my mom has told us the news. Out of all the decisions my dad has ever made, and he's made some head-scratchers, this one ranks as the most cowardly, one of very few I'll never be able to forgive—the decision to let my mom handle this alone, the decision to sweep in the next day with platitudes, the decision to not get on a plane and tell his daughters face-to-face that he has left us.

I won't see my father for the rest of the year.

Despite a lot of pain, despite reality stripping away all the idealistic views I once held, we laugh a lot this year. We stay up late, talking around the dining-room table. Rachel and I dance for my mother. I begin going to an after-school program where I meet a boy who becomes my "after-school best friend" and I remember, precisely, what he looked like. We play tether ball on the playground for hours together.

Christmas rolls around and my mom fills the room with gifts, overcompensating a little, I know, but loving us so much, always loving us with such a fierceness that she'd do anything—break the hardest news, remake holiday memories, laugh with us when it's nearly impossible—to make everything OK.

It was the hardest year of my life. But, somehow—as she always, always does—my mother made it OK.

Timeline: One Through Six

1982
I am born in San Francisco, on a Sunday afternoon during a 49er playoff game and a rainstorm. My sister asked for a puppy and it took her years to forgive me for showing up instead. For weeks my parents struggle between Noel and Marie as my middle name. They finally decide upon Noel but not before the birth certificate had already been filed and processed, with my middle name left blank.

1983, age one
Instead of a security blanket, I carry a security bottle. Finally, months and months past the healthy age for bottle sucking, my mom tells me she won't take a bottle away but she won't buy me another one either, so it's up to me to keep track of the ones I have. It isn't long before I lose them all, one by one. My mom tells me of the very last one, left on a city bus, and how it was painfully hard for me to realize she meant what she said.   

1984, age two
We go to the zoo, as a family, and it quickly becomes one of my favorite things to do. When we pass the seals and sea lions and catch a glimpse of the polar bears—the first bear at the San Francisco Zoo if coming from the main entrance—I crane my neck, tense up and hope there are two in the cage. It's a ridiculous quirk of mine, to become incredibly—inconsolably, really—sad when there is just one polar bear in the exhibit. I cry to my mom, "But, they're lonely! They need friends!" I imagine my sweet mother tensed up just as much as I did, hoping for two; hoping her sensitive, deep-souled toddler would be able to hold it together if the zoo had been unfair.

1985, age three
One of my first real memories was the sound of my mother's voice. I would walk beside her and grip hold of her purse as she would beg me to stop pulling on it. For years—beginning this year, it seemed—I needed to be near her. We left West Portal and moved to Daly City, and our new house was blue with hollow steps, big columns and deep brown carpeting. I thought we lived in a mansion until I was old enough for reality to taint me. Next door was a church; a church that would praise at all hours of the night. I remember keeling over with laughter, years later, as my mom stomped next door in her Snoopy slippers to tell the congregation she had daughters trying to sleep and could they please just KEEP IT DOWN.

1986, age four
At my Christian preschool I collect rocks at recess. One day, during worship, I dance around, forgetting about the rocks I've shoved into my dress, and they fly out all over the stage. The worship leader stops the music and makes me pick up each one before she'll begin again. At home, my sister begins teaching me after she gets home from third grade—and after making me schlep books and paper downstairs to our make-shift classroom. Before I turn five she will have somehow taught me to read.

1987, age five
I begin Kindergarten, at a great elementary school in the city, and we lie about our address so I can attend. I become best friends with a girl named Lindsay Farrell and we conduct the class symphony together, which I thought made us terribly important. At Christmas, after tearing open Barbie's Dream House and board games, my parents call me to the front room where a dog named Spencer is waiting for me. I spend the next few days convinced he is my surprise as I was the only one who didn't know he was coming. Months later, we come home to find he's chewed up the living room couch and my dad tells my sister and me we should get rid of him because of it. Instead, my dad puts Spencer out in the rain and leaves us to watch him. We cover him with a blanket and stay outside in the rain with him, never leaving his side. We call my dad, pleading with him to let us bring Spencer back in the house. Years later my dad will tell us he was always shocked we didn't just sneak him back in—it was a thought that had never occurred to us.

1988, age six
I move onto first grade. My dad and I walk hand-in-hand down Taravel, past a video store, while I yell out the lyrics to "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffet. When I screech out "it's your own damn fault"—the wrong lyric, I now know—he snickers for a minute before saying to me, "Some people may not know you're just singing a song; some people may think you're talking to them, so you should probably sing that in your head." This is the patient and incredible reason my father gives for why I shouldn't scream out—at six years old—the word "damn." It takes these memories to remind me he hasn't always been the man he is now.