if you still love me, please forgive me

i think perhaps childhood memories are better left there.

when i was in the third grade, i had a boyfriend named beau cannon. he was the coolest kid ever, and we always played power rangers with each other on the playground, he always rescued me. we would hang out at his house and watch cartoons an dplay in his back yard. he was a sweet kid and i gave him his first kiss [by third grade, i'd already passed that milestone]. but on the last day of school, he left me a gift on my desk, a nice hairclip for my hair, chich was past my hips back then. i went to find him outside to thank him, but i never saw him again. he moved away, and i never knew what happened to him.

ever since, i've looked for him. just in little places. i thought he had moved to mobile, so every once in a while i would google his name or ask someone if they knew him if they were from mobile. nothing spectacular. but since the advent of facebook, i broadened my search. i thought i could find all my old friends, stephanie denise from kindergarten, philip pender who got hot glue on my leg in fifth grade, omar awwad from seventh. i kept searching for beau, and low and behold i found him. we messaged back and forth, talking about power rangers, how he's engaged now and in the air force, and how our lives went from third grade into college.

now he's calling every day. i don't know how to react. i wanted to see how he was, make sure the memories were real, se eif he remembered me too. but now it seems that he doesn't have anyone to talk to, and he's calling me off the hook so that we can sit on the phone in silece. like lindsey says, there's no etiquette to how to deal with this sort of thing, re-meeting your third grade boyfriend, but i don't think this is the way to go. now it seems he's socially retarded, confused, marrying too early, and downright dumb.

the moral of the story, i suppose, is that i should have left it alone. i had great memories with beau, of playing pretend and him un-chaining me from evil's clutches during recess. we played connect four and card games, he gave me a power rangers valentine that i still have in a box at home. it was a bright spot in my childhood, a fun story to tell my friends. he was cute. i kissed him on the black top. we played kiss-chase.

but now, i tseems tainted. with the real beau. the 11-years-later beau. the beau that has nothing to say, and doesn't have any friends, and wants to talk about nothing. the beau who seems a little obsessive, a littel over-excited. a beau i wasn't planning on making time for. and now i feel like that little piece of my life growing up has a stain on it. i suppose i expected to find him and all of a sudden he would still be in third grade, and i would be too, and the past would crawl back soft and without discomfort.

i'm not going searching on facebook for any memories anymore, and i suggest none of you do either. it's lifting up a rock you lifted up as a child, but back then the things you found there were fun, and now they're just scary.

<3gen