This article was forwarded to me by a friend - I hope if you are reading these comments you find some comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your situation. I had to burry my boyfriend after a 4 year relationship and a long stuggle with cancer. the thing I learned most was to love freely and not hold anything back. I've now been in a great relationship for 3 years and it has made us stronger. The best thing you can do is to be open and honest and hold nothing back. After all, you have already been through the worse that can happen.
Christopher Churchill for Newsweek
MY TURN
Remembering the Perfect Boy
How could I tell Aaron, my new boyfriend, about my old one, my first love, the boy I will never see again?
Published Dec 6, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008
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Everything happens faster in college—semesters, making friends, falling in love. There's the option of hooking up every night, or there's the bookish life of study, study, study. Or there's me: confused and somewhere in between. The thing I love about being here, though, is that I can control who knows what about me. I get to escape the labels of high school, where one minute you're the girl with all the curly hair, and the next you're the girl no boy would dare hit on. When I arrived on this big college campus, no one knew my history, and that was fine with me.
Then I met Aaron. We were introduced in September by friends in our dorm, and we've seen each other every day since. Two nights after he kissed me for the first time, he asked if I'd ever been in love. We were lying on my bed, alternating between kissing and talking. I'd been dreading this question, and I hadn't expected it to come so soon. I froze, squeezing my eyes shut. "You don't have to answer if you don't want to," he said. I shook my head. It was probably as good a time as any to tell him that there were things he should know about me before we went any further. He could still say no, that this was too weird, too complicated to get involved with.
Yes. I have been in love. And it wasn't some silly high-school relationship. If my previous boyfriend had been into drugs or gotten me pregnant, I might've chosen to keep it to myself. But a story like mine changes a person in ways that never go away.
Nick and I dated for almost two years, I began. My eyes kept tracing the black-and-white posters of France on my wall while I fumbled for the words. "It was Thanksgiving break … He was out driving with some friends … He was killed in a bad accident."
Aaron gave my hand a hard squeeze, and we just lay there, the ghost of Nick floating somewhere in between.
Nick was the perfect boy for me. We were that sickly-sweet couple who never fought. Seeing him made me smile, pure and simple. I once made him promise me that he would never get seriously hurt or die, and Nick never broke his promises. Maybe that's why, even now, some part of me still thinks he's OK.
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