I dreamt about you last night. We were getting back together.

Just to recap, you were the first person I fell in love with. In my sophomore year of high school, I transferred from a bad public school in a bad part of town to the little liberal private school where you'd been going since about the third grade.

You were the rich kid and I was the poor girl, the shy girl who never had the right clothes. Everybody knew you and nobody knew me. I wasn't allowed to date that year. My parents were strict.

In junior year I dated this nice guy, but left him for you senior year when you kissed me in the computer room just before the end of the school year. But you took someone else to prom. I went by myself, which served me right, since I dumped a perfectly nice guy for you. I just couldn't forget that kiss.

Then my friend S. went to visit you at college and I tagged along. You let me sleep in your bed. You came home for Christmas and to my immense surprise you started calling me and coming around.

When you had to go back to school after New Year's you absolutely floored me by starting to cry when we said goodbye.

I took the bus nine hours to see you in spring semester. You got me pregnant and paid for the abortion. In summer we ran away to the mountains together. You taught me to drive on the way through Kansas.

In the fall we returned to our respective colleges. You broke it off. Then you missed me too much and we got back together.

Then I found out you had been cheating on me with several other girls. I broke it off to go out with a guy named Tex. I remember telling you about him, and his silly name, then lying on your couch with you and kissing you.

And then the years started spinning by so fast. You made a pass or two over the years and I was just determined not to let you in again. I love you still, but I haven't admitted it in years.

After September 11 I called you on the phone from Brooklyn and cried. You said I should move back home. I asked how your life was and you said you were living with someone.

It wasn't till you said that, and till it made me feel the way it made me feel, that I knew why I had called you. And then it was too late.

It's been at least a year since I've seen you. Your mother invited me to your wedding. I knew you didn't want me there, so I didn't go.

Your crowd from high school is throwing an informal little fifteen year reunion in a few days. I'm not going. I'm a grown woman and I live with a man who I'll probably marry. But I know if I go I'll just be reliving that moment when I walked into the prom and you were there with some other girl from another school, and you had rented a limo like the rich kid that you were, and she had a strapless gown and a corsage and the whole nine yards. And I was in a cheap dress from the Limited that my Mom thought I would be able to use again for graduation and for my cousin's wedding in June.

It was just bad timing all along. When one of us had the courage to take a leap of faith, the other was chickening out.

Because if you had had the guts to take me to the prom even though the in crowd would have laughed, or if I had had the guts to face the fear that you'd hurt me again, it would have worked. You loved me and I loved you. My friends and family hated you, your friends never quite got used to me, but we loved each other.

Now we always say it didn't work because we were just too young. But we weren't too young. We were too old, too conventional, too scared, too locked into roles that didn't matter then and don't matter now.

And now it's too late. You're with someone else, and so am I. I wouldn't even be thinking about this today, except that I dreamt about you last night. Fifteen years.

I love you, and goodbye. And I say that without any bitterness and with only the smallest bit of regret.

[submitted 05/12/03]