Love

I was in love once, you know. I was 8, and her name was Karissa Jacobsen.

No really, she meant the world to me. She was a cute little redhead with this splash of freckles across her nose. Karissa was the perfect girl; she liked to run, she wore dresses but didn't like pink, and she knew--just knew--that there was no way Bobba Fett could ever beat up Chewbacca.

We were in the same second grade classroom, and we would hold hands when we walked down the hall to music class. She lived about a half a mile from me, and I would always ride past her house with my friends when we rode our bikes. Every time she saw us go by through the big picture window in her living room, she'd run up to it and wave. I would do what 2nd grade boys do when around other 2nd grade boys, and stick my tounge out at her, and her smile never dimmed because she knew this was the highest form of affection a 2nd grade boy could possibly bestow upon a 2nd grade girl.

There was absolutely no reason why Karissa and I shouldn't have lived happily ever after and made absolutely dozens of babies together, as soon as we figured out how babies were actually made and got over our initial revulsion and decided that baby-making might be kind of fun. But over the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade the city of Dubuque re-formed a couple of school disctricts, and as luck would have it I wound up being the only person from my class who was moved to another elementry school.

Being a pre-teen is a curious thing. I could have called Karissa at any point in the ensuing years, but we went to different schools, so it just didn't seem like something to do. I still rode by her house with my friends on a weekly basis, but don't remember ever seeing her through the window again. Dubuque was, at the time, only a city of about 66,000 people but I never ran into her anywhere else. Even now, I sit here and think about that fact and it seems weird to the point of being impossible.

Karissa and I wound up going to the same Junior High School for a year, but by that time I was undersized and kind of geeky and she was a 13 year old girl and kids can be pretty mean most of the time. Those who say absence makes the heart grow fonder have probably never tried spending their formative years away from something they were fond of. Also, I'm not completely sure "fonder" is a word.

2nd grade love is the best kind of love in the world. Mainly because it's completely unencumbered by most of the things we as adults associate with love. She made me smile and I made her smile and we liked playing games together and I didn't even mind holding her hand. She would call me "cute" and I would stick out my tounge, and we both knew that those things somehow meant more than we actually understood. As people get older, those things take a back seat and people feel this need to manifest love in more quantifiable ways. In doing so, the base emotion of the thing tends to get obfuscated and the actual act of loving becomes much more complicated. We can't love like 2nd graders love, and the day we realize that is one of those dissapointing rites of passage that we all go through in becoming adults.

I haven't seen Karissa Jacobsen since the last day of 7th grade. My family moved to Des Moines the next year, and I've gone off and done...whatever it is that I've done since then while Karissa has quite possibly stayed in Dubuque and made babies with someone else by now. Some things don't change: I still think redheads are adorable, I still know that Chewbacca is the best fighter around, and I still have a tendancy to stick my tounge out at times when I probably shouldn't. But some things do change--have to change--in order for us to become responsible people who vote and raise families and accumulate too much credit card debit. One of those things, unfortunately, is leaving the Karissas of our lives behind now and then. Karissa is a fond memory not only because you don't realize how cool 2nd grade was until you're about 25, but because she represents a lot to me. The purity of innocence, the convictions of youth, and the beauty of possibility.

We can't love like 2nd graders. But we could all stand to be just a little more innocent.



Also, I just looked it up and 'fonder' is indeed a word. But it totally sounds fake.