Posted to arwm.

[kiya]

I wanted to keep it.

The context is that someone started a thread asking about first loves.

His name is Alistair; he went by Alick. (And when people called him a smart aleck he would just grin at them.) He had light brown hair, which he mostly had cut short but with a thin trail of hair down the back of his neck (called a rat-tail), which was in fashion at the time I think. (My brother had one too.) He had one and a half hazel eyes and half a brown eye; people tended to spend some time puzzling over what it was that was odd about him.

He had perfect handwriting. Not the ugly bubble handwriting that so many girls cultivated, and not the personalityless perfect Catholic school handwriting that my mother had, but narrow, angular script letters, slanted precisely, his name signed all written out with his middle initial (which was J, I don't remember what it stood for). I think he took delight in writing it out formally with his perfect letters: Alistair J. [Surname]. (In days when I wished I could ever get an A in handwriting, it was his script I coveted.)

We were in the same classes all through elementary school; he a year older than I, but just about everyone was, since I had skipped up a grade. Our social circles overlapped, because the extremely gifted kids tended to get pulled out for doing the same sorts of things; we were among the only fourth graders allowed to try out for chorus, we worked on the school newspaper together.

One day I was working on an editorial in the library, working with another one of the people in that same social circle, a fellow named Philip; Alick came over to give us a hand, and when we told him we were brainstorming ideas, he clutched at his head, dropped to the floor, and started twitching and muttering about the lightning.

He played the trumpet in the band, and I remember him standing in our fifth grade classroom with Lionel, the guy who played trombone, talking about the sorts of things that brass players understand that we mere players of woodwinds could not possibly comprehend.

I beat him in a wrestling match in the back of a van at, I think, the ninth or tenth birthday party of a friend of ours.

I moved away between fifth and sixth grade. I was at his school for an academic competition somewhere in high school, and we even tried to meet up (since he was there that weekend for some band practice, I think), but it didn't work out.

I miss him, in a weird sort of way, and wonder if I'd ever have gotten the courage to tell him about my crush if I hadn't moved away. I sent him an email a year or two ago -- he was doing grad school where my brother's at college -- but got no reply. So a road forever untaken, I suppose.

Addendum: He's doing architectural design work, if google is trustable on the subject. I cannot bring myself to be in any way surprised that he's doing something that involves drawing.