We met in school when we were fifteen. He had that great debonair about him even at that age. I didn’t know it back then, but for years I would compare every guy I met to him. Ridden by my teenage angst and constant overthinking on the verge of a sudden meltdown, his confidence in being himself day in and day out had me in awe. He had that mischievous smile and deep belly laugh you would only read about in books and wonder if anything like that existed in real life.
Thomas demanded to be called by his full name and no watered-down nickname version would do. His determination impressed me, I hated being reduced to the last four letters of my name but usually let people continue doing so anyway. He read Anna Karenina for its shattering sadness – everything demands to be felt, he would say – and claimed to listen to Nirvana made him understand life. I just started immersing myself in alternative music and read every book I could get my hands on. I thought about falling off a bridge often. Not because I wanted to die, but because I wondered what it would feel like to fall.
He called me kiddo and winked at me in the school hallways and never dated a girl who was acting indifferent towards me. We had an understanding but there was nothing remotely romantic about it. He took me to prom and spray-dyed his hair silver to match the slight silver shimmer of my otherwise black dress. He said I deserved attention to detail. I thought it was sweet, he said it was necessary.
It was the nineties. I never fit in, so I decided, I might as well stand out. I felt so edgy wearing my dog’s tags on my self-made choker necklace. People in school barked at me in the hallway laughing. He wore his dog’s tags in solidarity and the barking
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