by HL Borden

Created on: August 19, 2009

When I was 13, I found myself in a full-on case of adolescent infatuation. His name was Josh and he was my neighbor. Being neighbors, we hung out all the time doing random kid things. I worshiped the ground he walked on; followed him around like a puppy. He knew how I felt, but never took advantage of my feelings for him. He treated me kindly. He was my best friend.

We entered high school, and my family moved away. We were no longer neighbors, though still classmates. We ran in different cliques; he with the stoners, me with the invisibles. We no longer spoke, but he still was perched high upon my pedestal.

College rolled around and I moved to the other end of the state while he remained in San Diego. Since we had already drifted apart, it never occurred to us to try to stay in touch. I still gave him occasional fleeting thoughts, and probably compared a lot of the guys I dated to my idealized version of him. Of course they never measured up.

After graduating from college, I moved back to San Diego to try to get a TV job. It was shortly after 9/11 with television stations across the country facing hiring freezes, but I was cocky and thought that wouldn't affect me. It did. So I joined the military. Four years after the last time I saw him.

The day I was being shipped off to boot camp, I was sitting around the military processing station waiting for my orders. It was a large, sterile room filled with steel folding chairs and bored, scared 18 year old kids. I looked up from picking at my cuticles just as he rounded the corner.

It was surreal to be met with him, my perfect dream guy, after all those years. And in this situation, no less. Both of us liberal-minded, fight-the-man thinkers sitting amongst the sheep waiting to be herded. We talked. And talked and talked. It was good to see him again, but we were both being shipped off to various parts of the country to be trained in how to kill. I figured I wouldn't see him again.

I was sitting up one night working on my Chinese homework, trying in vain to get my characters to look like the intricate ones our Taiwanese instructors wrote so effortlessly, when i got a call from my mom. She wanted to give me a heads up that he had called her asking for my phone number. He tracked me down? He was that desperate to contact me? Be still my beating heart. He called my five minutes later.

We spoke for hours. And we continued our phone relationship through his training in Seattle, my move to Texas, his tour in Iraq, for years.

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