Never Let You Go

Jesse Pulaski once reminded me in a letter that he knew I remembered things just as well as he did, so why write them down, he asked. The resounding answer to that rhetorical question was that putting things down, pen to paper, gives them a sense of permanence. In our written word, we find a way to help things live on, oftentimes for much longer than we ever will. I always told myself I’d go back and reread the letters that Jesse and I exchanged beginning at the end of my freshman year of high school. I always told myself I’d keep the letters someplace special, someplace I’d never forget. But things get lost in the shuffle over the years. Things later resurface, and we don’t always know the reason why. Even though I might not know the reason right now, I know I have to find those letters. I care so damn much about them, not because they’re missing but because of what they contain: permanence.

Reasons and permanence aside, what brought me back to the letters? It was Dan Iman. And while this whole thing really is about Jesse, it has to be about Dan, too. I wouldn’t be where I am, doing what I’m doing, if not for him. Dan was the beginning—the very beginning.

Dan fuckin’ Iman.

That guy.

We were so young, and maybe, looking back on it, I should have thought to give Dan the benefit of the doubt. Was he really a bad boyfriend? A “bad” boyfriend? No, not really. We argued a lot, so that was a major bummer. He never pressured me into doing things, so that was a major plus. Well, there was that one time he pressured me to go on the biggest roller coaster at Busch Gardens. I caved in and said yes, not wanting to step on any metaphorical toes, but I quickly regretted it. Ask a person with motion sickness to get on the biggest, baddest roller coaster in the amusement park. That’s what Dan Iman did, and I was not amused. Zero out of five stars, would not recommend. That was the only time I was ever on a roller coaster. A real one, anyway. The kind of roller coasters I’m usually on are not the kind of roller coasters most people would think of when they think roller coaster. I may be on one right now, and if I’m being retrospective about this, all those silly arguments with Dan during the first half of our freshman year don’t amount to much in the greater context of my life. What do you really fight about in a relationship when you’re that young? All you ever even do is hold hands in the halls and kiss in the stairwell, maybe. What, did we get into a debate over whose parents were going to drop us off at the next semi-supervised bowling alley date? I digress.

Dan Iman. Back to that guy. When Dan and I broke up, as preteens and teenagers so often do, it was not mutual. I was kind of over his shit, so I ended things amicably or so I thought. Dan didn’t get the bigger picture nor did he see the split as amicable, so he embarked on an adventurous endeavor to turn every friend I had against me. He was pretty successful. Pretty? Very. Dan had a calculating, manipulative side, steeped in creativity—a creativity I hadn’t known about the entire time we’d been together. When we split, he was suddenly a storytelling mastermind. He’d carefully crafted an elaborate story for each of my friends, some tale about how I was more foe than friend, how I’d lied or spread a rumor about them or stabbed them in the back. All along, the truth was that Dan fuckin’ Iman had stabbed me in the back. My back was the back that had been stabbed. And it hurt. Hell, I’d probably even pick riding a roller coaster over getting stabbed in the back. Well… maybe I wouldn’t.

Dan told Sarina Mullinger that I said she was a horrible friend. He told Barbara Sherring that I called her overweight, which was quite comical because, regardless of whether she was overweight, I never would have said that about her as I’d always been self-conscious about my own body and who was I to judge. He told Sydney Pikes that I’d referred to her as a daddy’s girl. I hadn’t, but it was universally known that she was one, not that it would have prevented me from being friends with her. He told Jazmin Sinclair that I claimed she slept around with at least half of our band class. She probably had, but I never would have said it. Likewise, I wouldn’t have said that Jim Perry slept with our band instructor to get an A first semester—even if he really would have done it—but Dan told Jim that I had.

Lie after lie accumulated on Dan’s part, and I spent a couple of months to follow bleeding out, not quite literally. I begged my friends for forgiveness for things I’d never even said or done. Looking back on it, I don’t know why I did. Were they really my friends if they believed Dan over me? Most if not all of them weren’t quick to forgive, and I took that as a sign that I needed to try to move on, as preteens and teenagers so often do not. I struggled to mend friendships that weren’t worth mending, and when that next semester came rushing into my life while I was unready, I met Jesse.

What was it about him? Well, for starters, I was a freshman, and he was a senior. It was the spring semester that year, and Jesse was about to graduate in a few short months. Everyone thought I moved on much too quickly, as preteens and teenagers so often do—yeah, I know I say that a lot. But for Jesse? It was worth it. He gave me something no one else seemed to be able to, but I never quite figured out what it was. I knew this much: he wasn’t the senior boy all the girls were chasing after. He was like me, in some ways, unpopular and happy to exist going unnoticed. Jesse was tall with dirty blond hair that was always worn in some super-gelled nineties style. He wore rectangular-rimmed glasses that covered his ice-blue eyes, and even though he wasn’t doing well in his classes, his face was always buried in a book. Even if he was barely passing, he was so studious. He was sweet and funny, and sure, I know exactly how generic those fuckin’ descriptors are, but I liked the guy. I liked him a lot. And I remember, clear as day, the afternoon I found out he was going to graduate after all, despite the rumors circling around our group of friends that it simply wasn’t going to happen.

We were all eating lunch in the cafeteria. It was close to graduation, and our friends were discussing their upcoming plans for the summer. When the bell rang, he took my hand and led me out into the hall. Students hustled and hurried to their classes before the second bell, but we stood in front of an empty row of lockers by the gym. I watched in slow motion his lips as he said, “Let’s talk for a minute.” I felt in slow motion my head nod up and down, expecting to hear the best worst news ever—that Jesse would fail like everyone said, that he’d be held back a year, that I’d get to spend more time with him, and that he’d be in my corner just a little bit longer. We stood a while, in slow motion, the world inside of that school revolving around us like a circling solar system. Everything moved slowly and required a wide berth. When his fingertips crept up on a stray strand of my hair, I took a deep breath. He almost touched my face, I remember thinking. He tucked that loose tendril out of sight and put it back behind my ear for safekeeping, and his eyes, which were nearly gray, looked so slowly into mine. “I’m going away.”

“What? Like for senior week, or like after graduation, or like for the summer?” I asked. I said “like” too much back then, as preteens and teenagers so often do.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“My parents are sending me to boot camp,” he said.

“Boot camp? Okay, where? I’ll come visit,” I said eagerly.

“You can’t. It’s in another state.”

“I’ll be able to drive by then—”

“—On the other side of the country,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll save up for a plane ticket,” I said.

“They won’t let me have visitors.”

“Okay,” I said, that time accepting my fate in the form of a whisper or some faint sound that was hardly heard.

“I don’t wanna say goodbye to you. I’d never want to. But I don’t have a choice.”

“What does this mean… for us?” I said. Oh, the things we say when we’re young. I was so very dramatic.

“I could never ask you to hold on—”

“—But you already know I would.”

“I could never ask you to.”

In the ever-present silence of that pause, I could hear my breath over the sound of the second bell. I could hear my future car, wheels rolling on asphalt to wherever the fuck it was Jesse would later land. I could see my life flash before me—the preteen and teenager thing. None of that mattered anymore when he kissed me. His kissing me was the only thing that wasn’t in slow motion that day because time was suspended completely, hanging in limbo somewhere in the universe. I swore the clocks stopped ticking and the bells stopped buzzing and humming on the walls. Not a soul was left in the hall save for the two of us. His lips were a soft melody. Mine felt mediocre like a mere harmony. Our kiss was a song. I played it on repeat more than any other song I’ve ever listened to in my entire life.

“I’ll write you all the time. Every week. Every day if I have to,” he said. “You know I suck at writing.”

“You write beautifully,” I said.

“My handwriting, I mean.”

“I’ll get used to it.”

He kissed me again but much differently this time. His hands were up in my hair, and his tongue played an interlude with mine. It was almost as steady and reliable as the bass of my heart.

“But I’ll never get used to you being gone,” I said.

“Hopefully, you won’t have to.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean that no matter what happens, I’m gonna find a way back to you. When it’s over, I’ll come home.”

When Jesse had told me that, I’d already known that his home was never really a home in the first place. Maybe home was more of a feeling than anything else, and maybe that feeling was something he only felt when he was with me.

That day was the last day I saw Jesse Pulaski, but it most definitely, without a doubt, was not the last day I loved him.