SSSD: Day One

Okay, so here is my first piece of micro-fiction-- nay, my first piece of non-blog related writing-- in like many moons. Please let me know if it sucks so bad that it should be removed and replaced with another article on The Wonders of Neil Diamond (because I think I could crank out at least three more).

To see the prompt this came from, click here.

Also, before I begin, I would just like to say that Ben is a million times more awesome than the guy in this story, and I am not nearly this dorky anymore, and generally do not pick up shit I find on the ground and carry it around in my wallet.

And now, without further ado,

Where We Were From

They were dorky times, filled with dorky words: band camp. College freshman. Homesick and scared. Words that don't inspire "cool." And he was dorky, and I was a dork, and in dork love with him, standing next to him on the practice field, too afraid to say anything because at the time I thought him cool, older, exotic with his long eyelashes and his fancy, special trombone. Shiny trombone.

And there on the ground, tramped into the practice field by the feet of many marchers, was a piece of trash, a flake of a cardboard box, maybe, or a scrap of this brown paper, worn away at the edges. It looked very much like the state of Ohio. This was a sign. It was pockmarked around the place that I had grown up-- that dent, that was Aurora. And creased where I was now-- near that crawling ant, that's Ashland.

So I turned to him, and showed him-- I liked to pretend, at first, that it was him who had shown me, that he had found it, and he had given it to me, but that was not the case, because he didn't give me much, ever, really-- and pushed one edge into his hands, so he could see, and said: "Look. Ohio."

The first dorky words spoken in our dorky non-romance, which spanned four years-- first months of me calling down to his room-- "Do you have any aspirin?"-- even though I had no headache, just wanted to see his room, smell its boyness, then years of lunches together, evenings spent together, one awkward kiss that was never spoken of again, while we watched The Beatles' "Help!" on his tiny dorm room TV. Then a fight, a reconcilliation. Nights spent at his house, in the same bed, but never doing anything. Ever. He wore band-themed t-shirts all the time and dreamed of a day when he would live in Miami, because he liked the music there.

I was so in love with him.

I quit the band for the slightly less queer world of college journalism. He graduated and became a doctor. He called me once while I was in grad school and asked me to marry him, "because all doctors had wives." I was briefly elated, but it was gone fast. I never spoke to him again.

I still have that garbage Ohio. For a long time I carried it in my wallet, with my student ID and list of emergency phone numbers. Then, when I didn't care as much, I glued it into a scrapbook. I get it out and look at it sometimes, and see us at the very beginning, each holding one edge of a piece of trash that looked a lot like where we were from.