First Love, By Request

Who requested a post about First Love? Well. That would be First Love. Because apparently all he wants is to read about himself. Apparently the mundane details of my life are uninteresting to him because he knows the contours of those already, either because he knows who I'm discussing or because I've blabbed about those details to him on the phone. I have to say, I feel that he is lame for thinking that I should write about him rather than things that are of interest to my broader readership, but I suppose I can throw him a bone.

You see, I revealed the fact that I keep this here blog to him about a month ago (you see, I needed to forward him pictures that I'd already forwarded from my Dr. Crazy email, and I was too lazy to go to a non-Dr.-Crazy-identifying email and to go through the forwarding process full on, and so I decided, "What the hay! FL can know about my super-secret blogging identity!) but so I talked to him tonight for the first time since then, and he was all, "Yeah, I read your blog every day, and it's great, except for you don't talk about me as much as you should." Narcissist!

Dude, how do I get mixed up with these yahoos? Either all they want is to be blogged about or all they want is for me to shut the fuck up about them. No happy medium.

But anyway, FL. What shall I tell you about him? Well, I've written about him before. Actually, from doing a search, it seems that's really the only post I've devoted to him. Here's the thing: FL continues to be my friend because I refused to let him not be my friend, in spite of some very good reasons why I should have not wanted friendship from him (namely, that he was a total dick when he was my boyfriend and slept around the whole time we were together). That said, I invested a lot in him, and I cared about him more than I've cared about most people, so I made him be my friend. And yes, he did protest this, but it's very difficult for a person to resist me when I decide that person must be my friend.

But so FL lives in North Carolina, where all of Crazy's Important Exes live, and he and I talk about once a month or so. And he's... I don't know. The thing that's great about him is that as much as he's been through and as much as he's changed, he really is still the boy that I met when I was 15 at a Dead Milkmen show. It still takes the Spanish Inquisition to make him tell me what's going on with him, and he still makes the same silly jokes, and he still knows the me that I was when I was 15 and he still sees her in me. Now, I've got other friends I've known for as long or nearly as long, who also see that person, but he sees that person in a different way, because he sees me as that girl he loved whom he wasn't ready to love. And so when I talk to him... well, I see that girl he loved, too. And I see him as the boy I loved. And there's something special and unique and awesome about that kind of friendship.

The bitterness that was there is now so far away that I think that he and I just really appreciate each other in ways that we didn't even when we were together. I mean, sure, he is always trying to make crazy Desperation Marriage Pacts with me (I've negotiated to get him up to 38 on this, but I suspect when I get closer to 38 and if I'm still single that I'll probably try to negotiate even higher) and there is that undercurrent of a past that remains, but at the same time, well, there's a total honesty with him that is only possible because he really, truly is my friend. And in fact, there's even a different kind of honesty than there is with my other real, true friends because not only is he my friend but he was also once my beloved.