A reader I'm calling DM sends in this poetic, dramatic, and comic boyfriend list -- all that and it's only five guys long!

--E

DM's Boyfriend List

1 - A:   Love at first sight (I was nine). The curly, slightly greasy-haired Grecian boy with sandy eyes who wrote poetry and smoked cloves at seventeen. I saw him the day before I left for summer camp at age thirteen and wished him a happy fourth of July. The day after I came back home, a week later, I was told that night that he had shot himself in the head that morning.

2 - M:   The literal Boy Next Door when I was eleven. I had obsessive dreams of kissing him since we first met, none of which were fulfilled. My best friend, then, was of a very competitive nature and had a thing for him too. Of course. One night while M and I had been sledding until a heinously dark, late hour - at least seven PM - I felt for sure The Perfect Moment To Kiss was imminent. Quite abruptly, M picked up his sled, gave a wave (a flick of the wrist, really) and hollered that he was going in to get some supper. As for myself, I went straight into my room and I called my best friend to tell her that I had just gotten my first kiss on a moonlit sled date.

3 - J:   My first real love. Pined away for him for a year while we were simply best friends and he was getting over his last girlfriend. After a year of that, he was the first boy who ever said he loved me and to whom I said "I love you." And I did. We teetered along in a friend-in-love stage for two years, until he suddenly became sullen and quiet with me and I found out that he had been dating someone for three months. He insisted that he didn't know how to tell me this. I pined (this time alone) for another half a year, and if he just showed up on my doorstop tomorrow, I'd still probably be hard-pressed not to totally make out. He was the moody, artistic, ADHD boyfriend everyone has to have at least once to remind them of how much fun it is to be so passionate for one minute and then have a full-blown argument the next. It's the stuff novels are made of, really. Essential.

4 - B:   Not technically a boyfriend, since we never dated and I didn't like him. I mean, I liked him a lot. But I didn't, like, Like-like him. He followed me around in college for three years, pledging his love, devotion, and unending loyalty. He asked my parents (on two separate occasions) if he could marry me when I decided to "come around" to his way of thinking. Towards the end I was starting to experience the guilt of constantly being the Pseudo-Dumper in what wasn't even a relationship, as well as feel the pressure of the nagging fear that I might be letting the last train pass me by, so to speak. However, I stuck to my guns and we said our goodbyes as he left to go home after the last day of classes had ended. He handed me a ring he had bought and worn while we knew each other, and noted that he would "wait for me." Two months of not hearing from him later, I learned from his sister that he was dating her best friend and they remain hideously happy even now.

5 - M:   Maybe the last train. Not a boyfriend at all really, but he makes it on the list because I wish he could be. He gets his fun from sending me sympathy cards with the depressing poems crossed out and his version of humorous poems written in instead. We have Toothbrush Lightsaber fights in the middle of WalMart. He's from the slow, lazy south and I'm from the rushrushrush north, so he drives slowly and it drives me mad and I drive fast and he clutches the armrests of the car like he's in labor. My first kiss and it tasted just like I thought it would. And he's still not my boyfriend.