My second-grade sweetheart
I just wrote a letter to my second-grade sweetheart. He was my first "boyfriend" until he broke up with me for my best friend. I don't even think we held hands. He wasn't fresh like that Tony who tried to pick me up in kindergarten by passing messages down the row at naptime to tell me how much he liked me and chasing me around the playground at recess trying to kiss me on the cheek. We didn't talk much in high school, but when we worked together at Farm & Fleet for a few days, he could still make me laugh.
He joined the army right after high school graduation and went to Korea for two years. The last time I saw him was right after he got back. We went out for coffee at Belvidere's only late night diner with my friend Katie. They used to work together at the movie theater and had a running joke about meeting in the ushers closet. He seemed disillusioned that night. Even in peace time, the reality of guns and fighting weren't what he had imagined back in elementary school when he used to spend so much time drawing tanks and bombs and explosions.
He must have joined the reserves, though, because he got sent to Iraq back in the beginning of all this. He was scheduled to come home at the beginning of April and had been in Iraq for 14 months. And that's when all the uprisings started to flare up, and things started to get really bad. I was so afraid they'd make him stay. I hadn't seen this boy in three years, and I was still scared every time the evening news mentioned more deaths in Iraq.
But he's home. I've never been happier to hear one of my mom's guess-who-I-saw-in-church-on-Sunday stories. So I wrote him to say welcome home. This ended up sounding more like a eulogy than I intended, but I guess I'm still scared. My mom also told me he will probably have to go back in three or four months.
I just wrote a letter to my second-grade sweetheart. He was my first "boyfriend" until he broke up with me for my best friend. I don't even think we held hands. He wasn't fresh like that Tony who tried to pick me up in kindergarten by passing messages down the row at naptime to tell me how much he liked me and chasing me around the playground at recess trying to kiss me on the cheek. We didn't talk much in high school, but when we worked together at Farm & Fleet for a few days, he could still make me laugh.
He joined the army right after high school graduation and went to Korea for two years. The last time I saw him was right after he got back. We went out for coffee at Belvidere's only late night diner with my friend Katie. They used to work together at the movie theater and had a running joke about meeting in the ushers closet. He seemed disillusioned that night. Even in peace time, the reality of guns and fighting weren't what he had imagined back in elementary school when he used to spend so much time drawing tanks and bombs and explosions.
He must have joined the reserves, though, because he got sent to Iraq back in the beginning of all this. He was scheduled to come home at the beginning of April and had been in Iraq for 14 months. And that's when all the uprisings started to flare up, and things started to get really bad. I was so afraid they'd make him stay. I hadn't seen this boy in three years, and I was still scared every time the evening news mentioned more deaths in Iraq.
But he's home. I've never been happier to hear one of my mom's guess-who-I-saw-in-church-on-Sunday stories. So I wrote him to say welcome home. This ended up sounding more like a eulogy than I intended, but I guess I'm still scared. My mom also told me he will probably have to go back in three or four months.
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