nostalgia

earlier today, i was sifting through one of the many boxes that are piled in my living room hoping to find a book that i have been meaning to read. i stopped looking when i came upon an old journal dating back to my third year of college. i opened the back cover, started reading my last entry and spent the next hour or so indulging in my own youthful stories.

i am a bit embarrassed to admit that the primary focus of the latter half of that journal is my first "real" boyfriend. reading back, i cannot but feel that assigning such a title to this young man may be a bit misleading. we dated for all of two months, i do not recall being "in love" with him, and if i remember correctly, we broke up over his love for world of warcraft.

for some reason or the other, my last entry in this particular journal was a long list of the sweetest things this boy had done for me. i wrote it less than two weeks after we had broken up. i am pleased to see that my 20 year old apparently heart broken self could find enough sensibility to recount the happy memories.

below are portions of my old writings, recording some of my sweetest boyfriend memories. the he's are kept purposely anonymous to preserve the privacy of those who may be embarrassed by this would-be public outing of closet romantics.

"i doodle when i am bored and i bore very easily. tulips had just come into season, and so they were a frequent subject of my latest notebook artwork. a week or so after he had commented on one of my floral sketches, i received a photo of three red tulips with a note "tulips for my two lips." later that week, a small potted plant of beautiful red tulips magically appeared outside my front door in the hands of a grinning young man. i never told him that tulips just so happen to be my favorite flowers."

"for the first time in my life, i strained prunes through a mesh sieve in order to test a lower fat chocolate chip cookie recipe. luckily, they turned out well. while i was cleaning the large mess i had made, he walked into the kitchen with a foil heart, constructed from what was used to line the cookie sheets, clothes pinned to his t-shirt. for some particular reason, i was very moved by this. so much so, my joyful expression seemed to make him uneasy. the gesture was sweet and simple, priceless really."

"he gave me a $2 bill folded into two hearts for valentine's day. he explained that years ago, his grandfather had given him a two dollar bill, which he still, to this day, keepsakes in his wallet. he said that $2 bills mean a lot to him for that reason, and he added that he hoped that they may one day mean something between the two of us."

the tulips wilted. i never made those chocolate chip cookies again. and i have no clue where that $2 bill is. in fact, i am happily without a he in my life. but the presence of these memories remind me that love can be grand, and that moments, though ephemeral in nature, can live on forever in our nostalgic minds.