Just the other night, I spent over two hours on the phone with a guy I have known since the summer when I was seventeen.  That was one of those monumental summers, the kind for which really good movies and really bad pop songs are written.  It was this hyper-condensed series of weeks where I dealt with my first real experience with total heartbreak followed by the first time I fell in a great, healthy love and the entire time my mind was trying to prepare itself for the fact that soon I’d be going away to college. It all played out – every heightened minute of those heady days – at a sleepaway camp in the middle of Pennsylvania.

I don’t remember becoming friends with Jason; I just remember being friends with him.  On the surface, we seemed an odd pair.  He was several years older – something that seemed like it would matter at the time – and he was from North Dakota, a state I didn’t fully believe existed, despite what maps had told me over the years and despite the fact that it was part of that song I had to learn in fourth grade Chorus when we sang all the states in alphabetical order.  

It’s funny – I fully remember the actual moment of meeting many people I grew to truly care about that summer, just as I remember the first time the guy who would grow to be my boyfriend and I kissed.  (It was at a bar.  And the first time we fully made out, it was on a pool table in the Canteen, which we entered illegally in the dead of night when we should have been watching the children of adults who paid a fortune for their kids to attend a well-supervised summer camp.  I’ll just go ahead and apologize for all of that now, but really, not one child I was tasked with protecting was ever eaten by a bear, and for that I think I deserve just a little bit of credit.)  But when it comes to Jason, I don’t have that one moment that pops out that made us develop a bond.  We kind of weirdly just always had one.