When I was 8 years old I fell in love with a girl named Mara.
Now, we’ve all heard the perceived wisdom that children are incapable of truly knowing what love is, that what they’re experiencing emotionally is merely 'cute'.. relegated to ‘puppy dog’s tails and sugar and spice’. Well, that’s totally erroneous. I fell in love.
It was during an assembly in the main atrium of my elementary school when I first saw her.. I was just bending to my knees to get into the ubiquitous ‘indian style’ sitting position and our separate glances met. She was sporting a Dorothy Hammil haircut, a flowered blouse, and blue slacks. Her skin was a deep olive tone, and she had huge coffee colored eyes. I felt literally as if I’d been slammed in the head with a large hard salami – if you’ll pardon the salacious imagery.
For the rest of the assembly I couldn’t take my eyes off of her… I was struck by cupid’s bow.
I remember when my mother picked me up from school that day, my head was in a fog. I just kept repeating the phrase, ‘I love Mara’ over and over in my head like a mantra. It’s funny to think back on it now, the emotions were so pure, immediate, present there was no equivocation.. I was sure. As I said before, we’re all told as children that these are merely ‘crushes’ and that you’ll get over them, but I still remember Mara.
For the rest of the week, I was gonesville. I kept bumping into things, my cutting and pasting of colored cardboard started getting sloppy. I didn’t have my mind in my work. All I could think of was Mara. Around that time I had just received Glass Houses by Billy Joel from my parents, and I would sing along to ‘All for Leyna’ at the top of my voice. Me and Billy were commiserating in song. I needed to show Mara how much I adored her, or else it would eat me up inside, I would surely be consumed by the fires.
One weekend, I was out in the backyard kicking around in the dust feeling alienated, yet pretty cool too. I remember I was wearing my favorite pair of sneakers, red Olympians from Sears. I felt older, with this gnawing in my chest like a burrowing rat. All of a sudden, I knew what I had to do.
I ran upstairs, cracked out the art supplies and proceeded to create two beautiful works of art that would profess my love for Mara in as spectacular way as I knew how. I took out the magic markers and drew boldly, festooning the landscape with big red hearts, and wildflowers. In the foreground, I drew Mara and me holding hands, with more hearts buzzing around us. The final capper, in giant bubble letters I drew I LOVE MARA… I LOVE MARA!! My body crackled with electric jitter. I felt at the top of my artistic powers. I had jumped to the next level, and love was the impetus. Now, the only question was, how would I get these masterpieces into Mara’s delicate hands?
Well, here’s where the logic gets fuzzy...
In my ardor addled brain, I thought it would be a good idea to leave these laying out on my door step, with the hope that Mara might walk by,see them, pick them up, realize what I felt for her and together we would live happily ever after …
Ok.. in some ways I was a very.. slow.. child.
Still, that’s just what I did. I laid them right out on our front step. Of course it never occurred to me at the time, that the whole idea was shall we say ‘ill conceived’. I mean she probably wasn’t even living in our neighborhood, and most likely didn’t make a habit of walking up to strange people’s doorsteps searching for art. None of that entered in to the transom of my mind, all I could think of was Mara. So, I left them there and returned to the dustiness of my backyard and the business of kicking dirt and feeling cool.
Later that afternoon, sweaty from the day’s activities I checked back to the front step and THEY WERE GONE!! My heart palpitated with an excitement normally reserved for Christmas day, or CBS Special Presentations. I was literally bouncing around as if my Olympians had tightly wound springs in their soles.
‘I love MARA… I love MARA’…
I was a zombie.. I was retarded.. I was a retarded zombie. I was in love with Mara.
At dinner, I felt flush. My mind flooded with images of Mara and I running through fields together, holding hands, laughing with abandon. I could barely keep my mind on the boiled chicken my mother had run through the deflavorizing machine. I could only think of my beloved, which is the reason I hadn’t noticed my father sneak away from the dinner table. All of a sudden, I was startled by a loud, sonorous French accented mocking toned bellow barking snidely in my direction…
“WHO EES THEES MAHHRAAA?????? EET SAYS EERE ZAT YOU LOVE SOMEONE NAMED… MAHHHRAAA????!!!”
It was my father looming over the table with my drawings of love… Everyone at the table exploded into raucous laughter at my expense. I was humiliated and my love belittled. I felt ashamed and dehumanized. I laughed along too embarrassedly, but I felt deadened inside. I was ridiculed for feeling love. Love was something to make a big joke of. This was the lesson I took away.
As it turned out, this wasn’t an isolated event in my house. For years to come, all my brother and I would hear from my parents was ‘don’t ever get married’, that ‘the family is all you can trust’, that there was no such thing as love… It stands to reason I turned out the way I did. Ironically, now all my parents want is to see me settled down with someone. I think they know what they’ve done to me, and when I expound on my feelings of ambivalence towards love and dismiss relationships as mere simple minded convention, I can see the guilt in their faces.
I never forgot Mara..
In a strange way, she was the last person I’ve ever really loved, at least in a completely unpolluted sense. From time to time, I even google her. Of course, she’s probably married now with a different last name.
It's strange to think that somewhere out there, there’s a girl that was loved very intensely by a little boy during the late spring of 1980 and how she’ll go to the grave never knowing.
thora birch
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