The Boys I Have Loved

The boys I have loved have each wanted something from me. Their love was — perhaps not love at all — demanding, exhausting, draining. And now I wonder if they took everything that I had to give.

The first time I saw E, I was six.

By May, it was decided: I would marry him. We were still six.

For Passover, his father came to our classroom. Tall, oak-tree-colored hair that was swept over bushy eyebrows. We sat in the garden behind our first grade classroom as he told us the story of a group of people in a desert and a Pharaoh who wouldn’t let them go.

His father talked excitedly as we ate matzo, the butter that was spread over it melting in the spring sun. But I wasn’t listening to his stories. Instead, I was imagining me and E, the two of us in a little house filled with matzo that we ate together every evening after school.

Love was simple and sensible. All you needed to do was spread some butter or jam or chocolate over it.

But how to explain this to E, who was busy chasing after another girl? The next year, we both turned seven. And matzo no longer seemed like a good enough reason to love someone.

The boys I have loved fill up the spaces between my toes, the way that sand finds its way into the gaps between your feet.

There aren’t that many boys to speak of, but the scenes of all the words and looks between me and them could take up an entire beach. Memories are uncountable objects: like stars, strands of hair, drops of water. Pulling them apart is impossible.

Sometimes I close my eyes and feel them, in the crevasses of my heart: these boys who only seem to exist on these abandoned beaches, where no one but me ever wants to walk. Each time that I go back to this shoreline, I expect the tide to have taken them away.

To wash my heart clean of them. To throw the cracked seashells of their empty promises back into the ocean where they came from. To wade through the foam of the waves that will set me free.

But instead, each time I go back to this beach, there are new grains of sand. And this is how it has grown so big and so wide. It extends on until I can’t see it anymore. Until its edges disappear into the mist.

The thing about sand: the harder you try to hold on to it, the faster it escapes from your fingers.

I knew that I loved A when we were both sitting in his car, in the parking lot of a Food Lion, in the middle of summer.

His stomach hurt, and the heat was pressing down on the roof of his old Honda Civic. We were seventeen, and I didn’t yet know how to comfort someone.

So I told him to put his head in my lap, opened the windows, stroked his copper-colored hair that was almost as thick as mine. I had never done this for anyone before, and I thought that A must have known this.

The cool air from outside filtered into the car, and finally he lifted his head to look at me. Love was knowing that you had someone whose lap you could bury yourself into. Without asking. Without them telling you to.

The next summer, he went South and I went North. We practiced our love from afar, but somehow both knew that we were growing in different directions. And we each found other people to cling to.

The boys I have loved have pulled and pushed, leaving me bruised. Yet as much as they have taken, they have given, too.

They have each taught me how to love, in a kind of chronology that I string together, the way that I used to tie the stems of daisies when I was a little girl.

Each affair of the heart, informing the next. A narrative that tells the story of how much I have given, and all the things I now cannot bear to give.

And yet, somehow I end up again in the middle of that meadow of my heart. Again, ready to pluck every flower from the earth. Again, offering them up in the palms of my hand, as it is the only thing that I can give. All over again, to the next boy who stands there waiting for me to love him.

By the time that I realized that I loved D, it was too late to form the words that I wanted to say.

When I was with him, he took my voice. I wanted to tell him that I loved him on the car ride home. By the water in the middle of the night. On the roof under the moonlight. But every time I tried to tell him, only silence filled the space between us.

I knew that I loved him when I saw the sadness in his eyes. When we walked home together. When we were nestled together under a blanket, as though we had created our own little world that no one else could quite get into. When he slid his hand into mine on that sticky night in August.

And I also knew that he didn’t love me. That even if he wanted to, he couldn’t. What he was searching for, he would never find in the palm of my hand, or the crease of my waist. We were twenty-five, and now love was something else.

Love was letting go.

The boys I have loved each left callouses on my hands.

Signs of all the things I have tried so desperately to hold on to. Reminders of things that I thought belonged to me, but were never mine to have. Little bits of the people I can’t bring myself to forget.

Grains of sand that I can’t possibly begin to count.