Write something.

The more you write the more you leave behind. The more you leave behind the more you feel like you mattered, like you left an impact, accomplished something.

I was sixteen and it was the beginning of my first relationship. I dated a girl for a year. Fourteen months. She was fun. It was a fine relationship but nothing special. I was just happy to have a girlfriend, to be one of those teenagers who had dating experience. I wanted my peers to know I could do it too. It was important that I lived the movie version of high school. She played flute and was terrible at it but I liked her smile and her long hair, her curvy form and the way her light green eyes gleamed when she saw me talk about the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie, the latest Legend of Zelda game, and other commercial obsessions that mattered to a small town kid. In the winter we enjoyed ice skating in our small town’s park. A section of it was coated with uneven layers of water until it became a rink. In the summer we roamed the city, following no particular route as we explored undiscovered spaces near the mill pond or navigated broken sidewalks and unmaintained alleys, mindful of the city’s unenforced curfew. I would always be home by 11pm, mindful of my parents’ HEAVILY ENFORCED curfew.

At sixteen they had forbidden me from having passengers in the car. I was just learning to drive and should not have distractions. Even the radio was discouraged. Once I secretly took my girlfriend home after school. I don’t know how they found out until they revealed they had noticed the passenger window was left open and guessed I’d had somebody in the car. My parents never let me get away with anything.

My girlfriend had a broken home life like many of the pretty girls in town. Her dad was an alcoholic who never left his tattered La-Z-Boy except to visit the fridge and her mom a saturnine specter that made her an unrelatable and intimidating woman. I guess they liked me anyway. I think they appreciated my sensitive artistic sensibility and the instinctive respect I granted authority figures.

One day after school she and I entered her house and explored her cupboard for a snack. She found an unopened can of mandarin oranges and as we scarfed them down straight from the slippery aluminum I remember exclaiming hungrily “I wish there were more!” She stared at me, went silent, and left the kitchen.

I followed her into her bedroom, the site of many firsts. There would soon be another. I asked what was wrong, what had happened.

“You know what happened.”

“…I really don’t. Please tell me.”

“You’re such a boy and I hate it.”

“What did I do wrong?”

“You know my parents don’t have a lot of money.”

Baffled. Totally unprepared. “What?”

“The small can of oranges is all we can afford. You shouldn’t have complained about it. You made me ashamed of how poor we are.”

I was seventeen and it was the end of my first relationship.