In honor of Valentine’s Day, this week we’re taking a look at different kinds of love. Writer Trejon Dunkley joined The Show to discuss a teenage crush.
TREJON DUNKLEY: A pint of chocolate ice cream sits on my counter, and I grab a fork. I’m a couple of bites in before I realize I’ve left little irrigation tracks in the green cream, licked the tines clean. After all this time, she is still with me.
There is a girl whose name is not Ariel, but she came out of the sea and bewitched me, so it’s as good a name as any.
Everyone is in love with her, the way you will love the new girl you have not known since they were a scabby-kneed third grader.
I am 16 and so sophisticated that I have invented love just to bestow on Ariel.
I create ruses to stay close to her, and somehow it works. We are best friends, watching the sunset on her roof.
I am deathly afraid of falling off the precarious ladder leading to the roof, but I want to show her I am brave and worthy of her love. My heart pounds, with fear, with desire, as I make it, rung by rung, to her; sitting cross-legged, holding a pint of ice cream and two forks.
“It tastes better on a fork, I think,” she says. Now I think so, too.
There is a boy who is named like a Disney prince and I hate him. He doesn’t bully me, but his friends do, and he has no problem standing back and watching. He drives a car as loud as his mouth, and worst of all, she’s in love with him.
I can’t understand how an angel could love someone so pedestrian. I hate that by virtue of his sex, he can obtain what should be mine by right.
He tolerates me, like a girlfriend’s ill-tempered cat. He says “hello” in the hallways, and I ignore him. Now he intervenes when his friends are too cruel to me, but I feel no gratitude. It’s all a trick to make her think he’s some shining prince. But I, in my infinite wisdom, know what he is. My rival.
Somehow, he keeps tricking her. Year after year after year, they stay together, and talk of marriage and babies and all other matters not fitting for my muse.
I have to save her from the drudgery of marrying such a toad. If I finally tell her how deeply I’ve loved her all these years, she’ll see that she could love someone who would write verses to the gold in her hair, who understands her gentle, poetic soul.
I tell her, “You’re Ariel.” The name that is not her name, the subject of my verses, haphazardly collected on a poorly designed Tumblr blog that of course she’s followed for years. It is all for her. And now she knows it.
She smiles and she takes my hand and says, “Oh, I had a feeling. And thank you. You always wrote such lovely things about me.”
There is so much left unsaid but tacitly understood. She is in love with her Disney prince. Even if she wasn’t, it would be another boy, never a woman who would win her heart. We can go back to life as it was if we never bring up this truth again.
And so we don’t. We still share our poetry and climb on her roof and eat our ice cream with forks. And as time goes on, the intensity of first infatuation fades, and the steady calm of a dear friendship remains.
But she still stays with me whenever I stick a fork in my ice cream.
