I’ve been thinking about how sad it is when landscapes change, buildings are demolished and when you look to see the thing that was always there and then it’s not, it’s like one of the little teeth missing on a zipper.

Whenever I go back to my hometown, it always jars me ever so slightly when I drive down the street where my first boyfriend lived and his little old house is no longer there. Why do I want to see it? I don’t really know. It was so long ago.

But I do want to see it. I want my mind to go inside and through the kitchen to the stairs that led down to his bedroom. I guess it’s a comforting memory.

First boyfriends are not something you ever really forget, I don’t think. The hours we spent downstairs laying on his bed. Not just the things we did but the chit-chat, listening to music, arguing about music. He was obsessed with The Tragically Hip and I, at the time, Spin Doctors. We talked about our plans for the future. Knowing nothing but feeling like we knew everything.

He was possibly the worst kind of first boyfriend for a sixteen year old girl, at least in many parents eyes. He played guitar in a band. He had long curly hair and big huge brown puppy dog eyes. He’d recently dropped out of high school, had no job, no car or even a driver’s license.

The romance lasted all of six months and when I broke up with him my parents said I did it cruelly and actually felt sorry for him. But there was no going back.

It was such a juvenile type of love that I never even imagined, hypothetically, what life with him would have been like if we had never broken up. Still, for some reason, I miss the validation of seeing his little old house on that street thirty-four years later.