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Nutshell Kingdom: Love Like Yours Will Surely Come My Way
2005
If I divide my life in half, I'm seventeen. Not so old at all.
I was a lonely kid, filled with too much noise and weirdness for any of the figures of my childhood to really understand. I made my first real friends at the age of seventeen and I suppose, in their own way, those two people saved my life by giving me my first glimpse of what it was like to be heard and loved and understood. I didn't so much know what that felt like when I was little.
We were a trio at seventeen. We did what teenagers did, but in a weird way. We drove around, stayed out all night, listened to records with unflinching earnestness, talked, talked, talked. We fell in love with each other and, to this day, can mirror one another if the need arises. We spread blankets and watched for shooting stars. We informed one another about the lives that were forming, almost accidentally, in giant crashing symphonies around our heads in that rapid movement from childhood to adulthood. We finished each others' sentences. If life were a radio, one of us would tune the receiver while the other adjusted the volume. We all sang along.
To me, that time is as simple as Buddy Holly's guitar in "Everyday." Small circular pattern, innocent and sweet. A little echo here and there. Early morning and there's a chilly fog over everything. The world felt new. Those days with those friends: it was like I had just been born. For two years, every day was a revelation.
What was I like then, I wonder? In the story I tell myself, I was like a walking heartbeat, a regular live wire reeling with lightning patterns of words and energy and feeling that worked as a kind of twine that bound us all together. In my story, none of us could have even existed without my peculiarity and my innocence and wonder at the whole of it. Of course, my stories are just that - stories. I slant them the way I need them to be. I take those years and those friendships and make a bed out of them so that I may sleep as a 34 year-old man.
I can say this however:
When I was seventeen, I had two friends and I gave my heart to them entirely and in equal measure. When I die, the two of them can get together and do whatever they want with it. It was a gift; it belongs to them and I don't want it back.
Giving your heart at that age is like paying for something in cash. Everything that follows feels more like a check or money order. It buys the same things, but it just feels different.
