This isn’t the blog post I’ve been meaning to write, but it’s the one that has risen to the top of the pile with enough insistence that I write it. Maybe getting it out of my brain will help.

It’s not my story, and so I feel like I ought to apologize for talking about it. A very small part of it was my story, once, maybe, but that was over two decades ago. We were kids. The world was small.

He was one of my younger stepbrother’s best friends. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, I realized I had a crush on him. At that point, his sister was dating my stepbrother, and they both came over to hang out for a weekend. It was early October. I remember the group of us walking down to the video rental store that evening — it was 1998, so video rental places still existed. He bit my wrist. We rented Half Baked. I didn’t watch the whole thing because he tried to grab my notebook and read it, but I was an introverted teenage girl and my notebook was private. I tried to pull it back from him and we ended up in a tug-o-war through the upstairs hallway, him yelling “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” and bothering the crap out of my sisters (who, at that point, could tell I was sweet on this guy). I may still have that notebook in a box in my garage because I am that person who saves old notebooks in case there may be some good ideas for stories somewhere in them.

For some reason, he stayed in my room that night. I woke up at one point to find him watching me sleeping. I assume maybe there was cuddling — the specifics are gone but I am sure I have a notebook where I wrote them down. What I do remember is that there was some kissing. He told me he’d never kissed anyone before. He was the first person I had ever kissed outside of Truth or Dare. We decided we should be “official,” and so then we were a couple.

That pretty much meant we held hands in the hallways at school. Neither of us drove yet, and he got grounded for some reason or another so I don’t think he was able to come over on weekends. He wrote me a note in which he said “mein vater ist ein hosenscheisser. Ich hasse ihn.” — he was taking German in school. It was 1998 and Rammstein were big. The intended meaning was that he was very frustrated with his dad. “Hosenscheisser” was a word we’d found on the internet that supposedly meant someone who shits their pants. (We were edgy kids, right?)

Halloween rolled around and he was allowed out to go trick-or-treating. The group of us went around with his younger siblings. We did the teenage thing where we wore black and fishnets and probably a lot of eyeliner. After trick-or-treating he and I made out in this weird crawlspace at his mom’s. I hoped he’d touch some under-the-clothing parts, but that didn’t happen. He gave me a hickey. My stepdad made merciless fun of me for that.

I don’t remember much of our relationship between then and mid-December. Maybe that’s because he was becoming less invested in the relationship. One evening he was over at the house, hanging out with my stepbrother, and he came into my room. Opened the conversation with “… I think you already know.” And that was my first breakup. I was heartbroken. I blasted the angriest music I had (which, back then, was Pantera’s “Far Beyond Driven”) until my stepdad got upset with me. He thought it was because the guy was spending time with my stepbrother and not with me, which I guess was true on some level, but as a 16-year-old girl who had literally just been dumped for the first time, I was not seeing any big pictures.

This was 1998. In Xennial years, that feels like ages ago and also very recent history. Wrapping around the millennium bends time. Some time later, I found a photo of us that had been taken on Halloween — me, him, his sister, and my stepbrother. I had been cut out of it.

Eventually we were back on speaking terms. He was still friends with my younger stepbrother, and we were all going to the same college, so I’d see him around. This was the early 2000s, the era of Livejournal, and I would read his occasionally. Came to find out that back when we had dated, he had thought I was interested in someone else. He wasn’t entirely wrong — part of me had been, and still kinda was, even though that ship had long since sailed — but that didn’t mean I liked him any less. Probably that was why he’d called it quits. I’ll never know. I still thought he was a good dude. Still cared about him as a friend and as a fellow person.

Time continued to pass and we all became adults. He got married to someone we’d gone to high school with — I knew who she was, but I didn’t really know her. My younger stepbrother got married and we were both in the wedding party. My sister-in-law, aware that we had dated, asked if I had any problem with the idea of him escorting me down the aisle (I didn’t, but it worked out that we walked with other people anyway). The last time I saw this dude in person was at my older stepbrother’s wedding six years ago. We were friends on social media, but he posted sporadically. I can’t really even say we were “in facebook touch” — you know, that kind of friendship where you interact with each other’s posts more than you interact with each other as actual people. A couple of his most recent posts felt strange to me, but I didn’t know the guy that well.

So here we are now, present day, and I’m in a facebook parenting group with his wife. And it was in this group where I saw her post about how she’d unexpectedly lost her husband to suicide and had not been able to talk about it. I saw the name of the member posting and could not fucking understand what I was reading because if she was the one posting that, then that meant that this person that I had known in real life was no longer alive. And that suddenly his wife was left alone with two kids. I felt shock and then I felt anger. I’m so fucking angry at him for leaving them. I barely know them outside of social media, but like…. I’m angry.

And it’s not my business to be angry at him. It’s not my jurisdiction. But 16-year-old me is in here somewhere, still in love with him, and she’s grieving. Heartbroken again. And apparently I had to write all of this just to realize that. But that was so long ago. Now I have no connection to him beyond the fact that, at this point, we just basically had mutual friends. Even writing this blog post feels icky because it’s so not my business. And yet it’s just been on my mind, how unfuckingfair it is to her and to their kids that he’s suddenly not here anymore.

Part of this, I’m sure, is that I’m angry at myself for missing his memorial. I wanted to go, but I felt like it would have been awkward since I’m not so close with any of them. I hate that he’s gone and that his wife and kids are dealing with their world being flipped upside down, and I wish I could do more than just be mad about it. But I’m not sure how to do that.