A Light in the Dark - Part I
The summer I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. The bliss of that experience was short lived and what followed was a dreary emotional desert that left me wondering what was the point of living when we are all just going to die.
THIS IS PART 1 of a SIX-PART STORY
Image: Taylor Hernandez
The summer I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. As was to happen to me for the rest of my life, it was at first glance. Just one swift look across the lawn, over the heads of assembled campers in their shorts and T-shirts, and I saw him standing at the edge of the group, a handsome young man in khakis and a seersucker jacket, the camp gardener.
He didn’t look like a gardener. His face was chiseled and a lock of shaggy brown hair fell into his eyes. He might have been a poet or writer. A Shakespearian actor in plain clothes. My heart caught in my throat as I stared at him, and (did I imagine this?) as he stared back at me. From that moment, for the six weeks I was to spend there, I could think of nothing but this man.
I was at a French-speaking camp in Bar Harbor, Maine. Our ages ranged from fourteen to seventeen and it was an unusual camp: no sports other than swimming, no silly games like Capture the Flag, no red or blue teams, no reveille or vespers… no, this was a bookish camp and the most important thing about it, in my view, was that we were allowed to smoke cigarettes. Already, at fifteen, I was a heavy smoker and spent much of my time planning the next opportunity to light up. Smoking at home was strictly forboden. My strategy was to wait till everyone in the house was asleep and then lean out the window and puff away, usually managing five or six cigarettes in a row with fingers so numb from the cold in winter that I could barely raise them to my lips.
So to be in a place where I was openly allowed to smoke was heaven. And to have exalted feelings for someone like the gardener, the adrenalin rush of love coursing through my veins morning, noon and night, made the experience even more remarkable. The only problem was, I couldn’t be sure he loved me back.
We would blush and stammer and grow painfully nervous when we were around each other (usually at mealtimes), but it was rumored that he had a girlfriend and indeed, in the third week of our stay there, a woman of about his age (twenty-one) with bright blond hair and a curvy body, showed up and spent the weekend in his cabin.
Oddly, that didn’t deter me. I was living at the camp and the other woman wasn’t, so I would have ongoing opportunities to… to what? Snag him? Sleep with him? I’d never had sex with anyone before, had never even made out with anyone, so when I tried to think of what it would be like to lie in the gardener’s arms, I really had no idea other than that my heart would melt and it would be blissful.
Cover photo: Michael Weidner