Ben and i met in high school, april 1997, he’d just turned 16, and i was still 15 (16 in august). he was friends with my best friend’s older brother and she had met him before me at some sort of cookout thing her family had that i didn’t get to go to. for days she kept telling me, hey you should go out with this guy, he’s your type. ben was taking 9th and 10th grade at the same time, which meant in the mornings around the time i was going to gym class (ugh yes.. gym first period of the day.. fucking sucks) he was getting off a bus from the high school to go to his 9th grade classes. we finally spoke, and had a weird teenage goth kid conversation about how his family butchers rabbits (they owned a farm) and he could supply me with dead animals to put in some girl’s locker that we both disliked (yes… we were little terrorists) we never did that but our conversation became a friendship, and then i wrote him a letter and asked him to be my boyfriend. his response was simply “if you wanna” more or less. he’d never had a real girlfriend before and i was his first kiss.
we wrote letters to each other. leaving them tucked in a drawer in the science lab because we both sat in the same spot at different times of the day. and of course there was always a letter when we saw each other in the morning before class. we were the freaks “it” couple and everyone either thought we were adorable, or a union of satanic evil that would unleash hell on the school. i almost got suspended several times for HUGGING… i could understand if we had been making out (or worse) but… hugging?
he was the first boy to ever give me roses for valentines day. a memory that will live with me forever, because the same day, he had to get his wisdom teeth out.. he delivered the roses to me himself, in a half drunken, pain medication stupor. it was adorable and sweet and i found out later that he had kissed the back of the card for the roses while his mouth was still bleeding… some might think that’s gross.. but we were the token goth kids.. and i thought it was perfect.
i don’t exactly remember the date, but at some time during that year, we were each other’s “firsts”. we were in love, we wanted to get married, we were 16 and he was my everything.
and then there was the nunchucks…
my best friend’s older brother was stupid, brought them to school in his backpack by mistake. being dumb he handed them to ben and asked him to give them to my best friend so she could take them home with her (i have no idea why he needed someone else to take them home…) he handed them to me and i put them in her bookbag (with her permission). about 15 minutes later, we were all expelled from school for possession of a weapon. these were two crude wooden sticks tied together with a shoe string. none of us planned to use them. it was a dumb mistake.
i spent the last 3 weeks of school in an alternative school program meant for bad kids. ben and i, and my best friend, were in a library, with packets of work from our teachers, no one to help us if we didn’t understand the work, and we were forced to eat lunch and have gym class with a bunch of kids who were unable to attend regular school because of mental issues, or they had been expelled too many times, or they just chose to go though that program instead. it was a very miserable experience and it cost me. i was unable to pass 9th grade due to my inability to finish the work given to me because i had no one to teach the material to me so i would understand what i was doing.
anyway, we weathered that storm and that was fine, but it meant that when ben was in 11th grade, i was once more stuck in 9th grade… it was hard to see him, but mom and dad decided to allow me to spend weekends with him at his house. i would ride his bus every friday, and my mother would pick me up every sunday at midnight. those times were fun.
i made it though 9th grade pretty easily that time around, got to go to my first prom with ben (his junior prom), and everything was wonderful.
10th grade and i was finally in high school with ben, we endured a lot of harassment around this time. columbine happened, and of course, everyone looked at us like we were ticking time bombs. people either treated us like we were going to kill them, or they harassed and sometimes violently assaulted us. all because of how we dressed, and the music we listened to.
ben’s senior prom, high school students with prom tickets are given a half day so they can get ready for prom. before we are allowed to leave, the principal and a police man search our car and book bags, stating someone had told them we were planning to shoot people as they left school. it was humiliating. the prom was lovely however and we enjoyed the night regardless of the humiliation in the parking lot.
not long after that however, life changed for us for the worse. this is the part ben hates me to bring up. his stupid moment, my broken heart.
ben cheated on me with a good friend of mine, and when i realized what was going on, i assaulted her with the plastic lunchbox i carried around as a purse. smacked her up side the head with it. looking back on it, i barely remember what happened. there was a full week of questions and truths coming out that i didn’t want to know… i ripped a large slash into my arm with a nail and had what i would consider a complete mental break down.
after i hit her, i never saw him again. i didn’t want to see him again. they made me go to a psychologist in order to keep me out of doing community service, and the doctor asked me “if you could take that moment back and do it over would you?” and my answer was yes. he made me write a paper on trust, which i don’t think he ever read… because it was a rambling mess about how i would never trust anyone again.
life went on, i got a rebound boyfriend (sorry craig) who ended up being a good friend. he saved my life that day that i met him, because i was honestly going to commit suicide over what had happened, and he didn’t let me go home that night.
ben and i spent a long time going our separate ways, we did speak, and danced one dance, at my senior prom, but beyond that we had no contact ever again. then years later he started messaging me online. first on myspace, which i ignored, and then on facebook, after my mother died. it took a lot for me to talk to him, and not want to shred him to pieces… i have a horrible time forgiving and forgetting.
the times i spoke to him on facebook at first, were very small conversations. and then one day i added a bunch of old photos from high school to my facebook album, and decided to put up the old ones of us from happy times. he would comment on them and tell me that he still had the prom photos and other things, and it kind of softened the ice wall i’d put up to keep myself from him.
then there was moving day. i needed someone with a truck, because we were moving pretty far away and i had a lot of stuff to take with me. ben was the only person who offered to help me move my stuff. he showed up that weekend and we spent way more time than we should have together. it took forever to pack stuff up and get it in the truck, we ended up eating at a resturant with my brother and sis in law, and ben paid for the whole meal and we ended up sharing a dessert thing that we didn’t know was going to be a… date thing. the place we were moving to was several hours away and that meant i was trapped in a pickup truck with him for several hours… we talked about a lot of stuff. memories, highschool, what happened to us back then. he apologized so many times for what he did i can’t even count. he seemed completely different, sweeter, and more grown up (of course, we’re both 30 now so… duh.. he’s more grown up). and then i was just down right cheesy. i told him this was the first time i’d ever ridden in a vehicle sitting so far away from him (i’d always sat right next to him in every car, or truck he’d ever driven) he moved the middle console up to make it into a seat and pulled me next to him. i felt like i was where i was supposed to be… like time restarted where we left off. i felt like crying. all this time i had been searching for something, i was trying to find my way back to him.
of course i was dating someone else at the time… lucas, my long distance hell of almost 5 years…
ben and i continued to speak on facebook after i moved, and i decided this was something i needed to do. i broke up with lucas, and asked ben if he would like a second chance… something i have never given anyone i have dated, ever… his reply was very much like the original reply to my “will you go out with me letter” from 9th grade. so we shocked everyone on facebook and announced that we were dating and it was just like we were teenagers all over again.
because i now lived several hours away from him, he decided to move me into his home. he’s a truck driver, so he’s rarely home, and he needed someone to help tidy up the place, and hey i wasn’t going to say no… we’ve been back together for 3 months now, and its like we never left each other’s sides…
now we’re going to get married. and i’m having his baby. life is perfect. this is where we should have been all along.
