Whatever happened to Harry? is a series written as a follow up to My “cougar” days, part one
Gratefully, I had a very different experience in The Box this time. Clearly, 10th grade had been the happiest year of my teens – this cute boy named Harry was crazy about me, and I was enormously popular! 
It’s all right there in my diary. What a satisfying read, and how grateful I was to be presented with the evidence, provided in the often-breathless, always exuberant style of my inner 15 year old. Harry did this, and Harry said that, and Harry is so cute and funny… I cannot keep the smile off my face, even typing this.
Remember last month, when I wrote about not wanting to be around when people were playing with a Ouija board? Well, something I read in the diary that I had not remembered had to do with Ouija and the softer side of Harry. At the sweet 16 party my friends threw for me, which the boys had crashed, someone dragged out a Ouija board. Despite my protestations, the lights were dimmed and they started playing. I got up and left the vicinity until it was over, and a few of them laughed at me for being scared. Not Harry. He abandoned the game and planted himself close to me, never saying a word. Looking back, I find that so unusual for a boy of his age; one would think he’d be prone toward leveraging a teasing opportunity, but he didn’t.
I read the diary up until the part where my family moved away, and put down the book feeling very certain that no subsequent developments could possibly detract from any of my fond memories of him and our good times spent together. We were buddies, we had fun together, and we had progressed to a point whereby we were happily devoted to one another in a carefree way that only people who have not yet been hurt by love can be.
A very clear picture began to emerge of what had been bothering me the most. It was the thought that their love for me had been a lie; that because they were gay, these young men could not possibly have loved me like they said they did. I’d been laboring under the false notion that a guy is either gay and loves men, or straight and loves women – there was no spectrum, no bell curve, no shades of gray. It had especially bugged me where Harry was concerned; my memories of our brief time together were very happy ones, filled with healing laughter that helped to displace the grim realities of home. The black-and-white thinking I’d been indulging in had threatened to invalidate what had arguably been the brightest period of my otherwise miserable teens.
Putting it all together – the wisdom of “mah sistas”, the experiential knowledge shared by Spencer and especially, the diary entries – it all reinforces something I already knew but apparently needed to be reminded of. It’s something akin to what we learned in science classes back in school. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. It’s the same with love.
To quote myself, “…love is infinite. Which means, not only does it abide into the future, but it abides into the past, with no alpha or omega. Kind of like God.”
And so it happens that when we love, we are like God for one another. Love heals, love transforms, and love never fails.
My inner 15 year old smiles, and whispers, “I will always love you, Harry.”
© 2009, The Single Rider. All rights reserved.
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