Member-only story
Why…(and How?) Do We Fall in Love?
I Thought I Knew. I’m Rethinking A Lot of Things.
When I was a very young girl — very young, like six years old or so — I was smitten with a boy in my class. He was tall and fresh-faced like Opie on the Andy Griffith Show. Very boy-next-door. I used to imagine that he desired little more than to sit with me at lunch and that we’d be blissfully unaware of any of the other kids in the cafeteria, who would all fade to a movie-quality dissolve as we sipped contentedly from our milk cartons, side by side.
This lunchtime scene never happened, of course, both because he was not at all aware that I existed, and also because he surely would have suffered death by cooties if he sat with a girl at lunchtime.
My unrequited adoration went wholly unnoticed and eventually the boy grew up to be a handsome teen, but not the kind of boy I pined for. I suffered no loss.
He was replaced by others, though, for whom my heart went pitter-pat over the years, to varying degrees. In my sophomore year, I met a boy from the neighboring town while I was at the county fair. The fair, held just a week or so before the start of the school year, was a standard rural rite, complete with dairy judging and tractor pulls. I was dragged there on Wednesday or Thursday evening with my mother and her barbershop quartet. Death by boredom or…
