When I was eighteen and you were still learning to drive we both finagled transportation to some neighborhood in the borough. It was hot outside and I was warm but not sticky when you started to talk about your ex-girlfriend and how you met her. How it was that she had been your first.
I found out many years later that there had not even been sex. That you were two kids, really, still practicing feelings and words and the dance of courtship.
But as we walked I told the story of the woman who had brought me out of my old shell, and whom i would have married if you could do that sort of thing in high school. We kept going, around cul-de-sacs and parked vans and kids playing. You kept talking about things that seemed dirty at the time: who liked who, what it was like to kiss a girl or meet her parents, how to come out. I was, at first, scandalized that the men on ladders painting and the women minding children and the kids on their bikes would know that we sometimes dated GIRLS.
And then, slowly, as the afternoon stretched on and the landscape changed from houses to 7-11 and the hair place, I realized two things. One, they probably were not listening that closely. And two, it didn't matter. We didn't have to know who we were. They had no say in it, either. It didn't matter what they thought of us. We didn't need all the answers about our lives. You didn't seem like you cared what anyone heard because you didn't care what anyone heard. Your life was your own.
This seems so simple now. But I want to pass it on.
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