Love in the Time of PowerPoint

At age 15, I started going out with my first boyfriend, “Dave,” pictured here with me at homecoming. (He really looked like that.) Dave lived in my neighborhood, but attended a different high school due to complicated district boundaries that only the Chicago suburbs could invent. He was a junior while I was a sophomore, therefore giving me some “older boyfriend cred” with which my friends could not compete.

We had started dating over the summer, filling it with idyllic suburban dates like biking to the playground and skipping rocks in retention ponds and wandering around Wal-Mart for no real reason. Once the school year came around, Dave and I were kept apart by those cruel district boundary lines, and I was reduced to waving as his bus passed my bus stop, weary for the day our hands would touch again. Which was probably Friday because this guy seriously lived three streets away from me…

But I could never pine over my Very First Boyfriend for too long. Once we were reunited, our love was as fresh as the dandelions littering our subdivision’s solitary greenspace.

September marked our two-month anniversary, a big milestone in any high school relationship but obviously not nearly as momentous as the three-month-aversary. Homecoming was also just around the corner, so I was certain that Dave would be planning a romantic gesture like no other.

I didn’t have to wait long, for my doorbell rang on the day of our two-month, and I raced to greet Dave. Only, it was not him but a single, heart-shaped box on my doorstep. The kind you would put assorted chocolates in, but, like, if you went back in time and bought them from a Walgreen’s in the 90’s. It was adorned in off-white lace with a few fake flowers haphazardly stuck on and red, holographic paper covering the front of it.

This was the high school romance I’d been waiting for.

I brought the box inside and opened it on the staircase, unable to wait until I got to my room. It was such a small box and too light to actually contain chocolate, so I couldn’t begin to imagine what was inside. A necklace? A cutesy picture frame with a photo of us? A mix CD of songs that reminded him of me?

My answer was taped to the bottom of the box with a double layer of masking tape.

A floppy disk.

I held it up quizzically and turned it over in my hands. This was 2005. While I wasn’t in the age group that had never, ever seen once of these before, I definitely hadn’t held one since I played Oregon Trail in third grade.

But thank God my parents never upgraded our desktop or else I would have had no idea what this mysterious floppy disk beheld.

I went back downstairs, kicked my sister off the computer because, you know, love conquers all, and threw in the floppy disk. On it was a lone file with my name labeled on it.

With trembling, anxious, probably sweaty hands, I clicked on it.

It was a PowerPoint.

I crinkled my nose. A PowerPoint? Like, for a school project? Did Dave send me his homework?

No, this was not any PowerPoint, dear readers. This was a PowerPoint masterfully created from the hands of Dave. A PowerPoint of love, of a commitment that can only come from 60 days of dating someone.

The title slide rang out good tidings. “To Tracy, on our two-month anniversary.” I advanced the slideshow.

Slide two was a whirlwind of emotions, a kaleidoscope of slightly distorted pixels that I believe formed the image of a sunset over the ocean. Overlaying the landscape in neon-green calligraphy, Dave poured out his soul, articulating the three to four reasons he loved me in a bullet-pointed list that would make corporate executives weep.

I cannot recall any of these points because my vision must have been blurred through my tears. This high-tech declaration of love, this totally not an afterthought of a gift, this was all my teenage heart had dreamed of and waited for. This was IT!

I clicked the mouse again. And the PowerPoint promptly ended.

“Wow, I really can’t think of what else to say,” Dave had typed, in varying degrees of grammar and spelling. “Man, I just had a brain fart or something. Anyway, I love you and happy two-month anniversary, Tracy.”

…Did Dave just admit that he ran out of reasons he loved me?

This would have been a warning sign, if I weren’t, you know, 15 years old. I want to believe that a tiny part of me thought this was bizarre because I really couldn’t have been that dumb at that age… right?

And, like, where did he even get that floppy disk? I was making sick mix CD’s of classic rock hits (I was way too cool for pop music) at that point in my life. But Dave could only deliver his romantic screed on an outdated storage device?

Perhaps it comes as a shock to you, reader, that Dave and I went our separate ways a week after that homecoming photo above was taken. He moved on to another girl a few days later and blocked me on his AIM friends list, after IM-ing me that it was over. (Did I mention he lived mere blocks away?)

My first boyfriend in high school was also my last boyfriend in high school. I held onto that floppy disk for posterity, as a symbol of confusing teenage romance, for way longer than I ever should have. Dave and I would later go through periods of reconciliation, but our love was never meant to be.

Looking back, I wondered what I could have done differently for the boy with Microsoft Office. Could I have done anything to seal us together for eternity? Or should I have taken his lack of reasons for loving me to heart and left before he could break that fragile organ?

Nay, as an older, wiser woman of 25, I know there is little I could have changed. But there is one thing I should definitely have done differently.

I should have mailed him a PowerPoint of reasons why he sucked.

Hindsight is 20/20.