Her name was Anita.

It probably still is, I guess, but it’s not special to me anymore and neither is she.

Not at all and I guess it’s her loss.

But for a long, long time in my life, right up until I was in Grade One or so, I couldn’t say her name without having a sad song in my mind and it wasn’t her loss at all. It was mine and I felt it very deeply.

When I would have one of those sad song minutes, feelings would twitch through me like an old dog having one last dream of chasing rabbits before he dies. Only it was worse than a dream because it was an actual memory. With a dream, you can wake up and it’s gone; it was never actually there, but you can never wake up from a memory because that memory is real and its power stays in your head forever. Unless you hit your head really hard, which I realize now has happened to me enough times that I shouldn’t remember any of what happened with her. But I sure do. I remember everything about her.

Until the morning she left me to go to Kindergarten (forever), I had no idea that Anita was older than me. I guess if I had sat and thought about it in a logical way, it was obvious, but there wasn’t any reason for me to do that because it didn’t matter.

She wasn’t bigger than me.

She wasn’t mean to me.

She didn’t tease me, or hit me like all the other older kids did.

She wasn’t greasy and scary and she didn’t smell like cigarettes and siphoned gas.

She was soft and clean and had long blonde hair, straight down her back.

She was a girl.

And we were in love.

We had the true kind of love that you are sure will last forever, the kind of love that gives you enough more than enough mental strength and the moral courage to withstand ruthless mockery pointed at you by your own best friend Greg and by Man, the older boy one street over (who was my hero because he had a car and smoked and had matches), and by every other vicious kid in our neighbourhood, all of whom laughed right in my face and called me a Girl Liker and made fun of me for feeling love and having a beautiful girlfriend with whom I could share my life.

That’s what true love did for me. It gave me strength to walk right past all those mean boys and saucy girls and not hear anyone shouting “Baby!” or “Kissyface!” or any of the other bad stuff they said. When you are in love, especially if you are in love with Anita, all you have to do is think about her hair and her face and her smile and there’s no room in your mind for any of the bad stuff people are yelling at you.

When you think about Anita, there’s no overwhelming fear of being killed by Evil Danny.

There are no worries about dodging deadly stink bombs.

There’s no anxiety about fighting for survival on John Street.

There are no loud cars driving too fast that might hit you or weird cars driving too slow because there’s a scary old guy looking for kids.

There were no sick stomachs about having babysitters.

And there was no more existential terror about being left alone forever.

My time with Anita was different from every other part of my life. We lived in a perfect Now, chopping rhubarb out of the garden behind her house, armed with a salt shaker and a bread knife, saving caterpillars from off the road and making them houses, or laying in the grass in the sun, listening to the electric hum of hydro lines or cicadas, I never knew which, and not caring what else we did as long as we were close.

When I played with my normal friends it was action, all arms, legs and angles, running, jumping, climbing, moving, kicking, yelling and fighting, but with Anita, we were quiet and I was able to use my senses, which were incredibly intense. Tasting the bitter stalks of rhubarb under the metallic tang of salt, listening to the whooshing rhythm of her heart, feeling the warmth of her cheek on the side of my face. I had so many different feelings all at once with her that it made being with other people feel empty and dull, like eating chocolate and realizing it’s turned to mud in your mouth. I didn’t want mud. I wanted chocolate. All the time.

It went on like this for a long time – maybe even two weeks or something – throughout the summer of 1969 and I don’t ever remember wondering or thinking about what day it was, what month, or even what time it was. The phases of my day weren’t marked out by hours.

Every morning, instead of a clock telling me a number, I should have had one with these twelve things:

Wake up.

Cereal and toast.

Play.

Peanut butter sandwich.

Play.

Crackers and juice.

Play.

See Dad at supper. Have meat and potatoes.

Play

Watch TV and have cereal.

Go to bed and read.

Dream.

If you had asked me how many hours were in a day, I would have asked you how many times we ate and how many more shows until bedtime. It was never about the numbers for me. It was about what thing I was doing or what show was on. News o’clock (yuck). Edge of Night (yuck) and Mom is ironing (also yuck because of that ironing spray) o’clock. Toast o’clock. Meat and potatoes o’clock. Go to bed and read o’clock.

But life won’t let you stay that way. When you are about four years old, time comes to you whether you like it or not.

That’s what happened in September of that year. Time came for me, minutes, hours and days, all of the parts, all at once. It came to me with a brutal kick in the face when I found out that September would be the time when Anita was dragged away from me, transported all the way across Clinton and forced to hang around with a bunch of older kids she doesn’t even know. Because Anita had to go to school.

That’s when I started learning the hard way that that nine o’clock meant Anita was just gone until almost Cartoon Capers at lunchtime.

That’s also when I found out ten o’clock meant your mom was getting sick and tired of you moping around with your lip stuck out so why don’t you go outside and do something with the kids on John Street before she gives you a good reason to mope with your lip stuck out o’clock and when I found out that eleven o’clock meant keep asking your mom when it was going to be eleven thirty because this has gone on long enough and when the heck do they let those poor kids out of that terrible place to be with their beloved boyfriends o’clock. And best of all it was when I learned that eleven thirty meant I could run down to the end of my street and wait for Anita to come home to me again o’clock.

I was so done with o’clocks, but I was more than happy to start waiting for Anita at eleven thirty on that first day of school at the end of my little street, pressed up against the edge of Shipley, where I was NOT allowed to cross, waiting to see straight blonde hair catching the sun as she came home. And that’s just what she did, so every day thereafter, I stood poised on the grass at the corner house, aimed at Princess Street like a pointer puppy sniffing the world past his leash, leaning way forward, fighting the tension in the lead. Waiting as hard as I could.

The other side of the road was so close over there, just across Shipley, close enough for me to throw a rock over and probably kill anything on the other side. There was hardly any cars, so you weren’t scared and the road was actually pretty thin. The other side was close enough that I couldn’t stop thinking how easy it would be to slip carefully over to the other side and just nip quick as punch down the road and meet Anita way up closer to Fairholme’s Dairy. I could just make a lightning run across Shipley Street once I knew there were no cars coming and-

“DON’T YOU DARE CROSS THAT ROAD!”

I whirled around, expecting to see my mom and ready to tell her I wasn’t going to do it and that she didn’t have to-

But she wasn’t there.

Nobody was there.

I sighed. This again…

The other side of the road might as well have been across a flaming trench of oil soaked razor wire because I was not able to cross over.

I don’t know how she had done it, but my mom didn’t have to be there to stop me from sneaking across. She didn’t have to be anywhere to stop me from sneaking around doing anything. Somehow, after watching me become a Scientific Master of Poison Chemistry, the proud owner of a terrible scar on my foot, and recipient of two sweet concussions before I was four, my mom acquired an incredible skill that seemed to reach maximum intensity right around the exact moment I began to discern the difference between Good and Bad.

It was no coincidence.

The timing was too perfect. It was like, as soon as I figured out about Bad Things, she did this trick where, if you had cut me open and looked in my little head, there in the head guts you would have seen a tiny projected version of my Mom, sitting there, waiting for me to make a Bad choice and she would tell me to STOP DOING THAT THING in a powerful voice I could literally hear in my ears.

Somehow, this seemingly normal 27 year-old mom acquired the ability to travel through thought beams to a second Her in my brain. From here, she could spy on me full time with my own eyes, and at the moment I was about to do or say something that might have leaned the tiniest bit towards dangerous or bad, she would shout at me and I would hear it from the inside out:

“DON’T YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!”

Imagine being in the kitchen by yourself, and maybe there were cookies (the good kind that somebody made and have chocolate), and maybe Mom went to the basement for a minute so who’s going to notice if you have one tiny cookie crumb before supper and then-

“DON’T TOUCH!”

-you get goosebumps, you freeze in place and you cannot control your limbs. You want a cookie (because they are the good kind), but you’re unable to reach for one because you are stuck there because your Inner Mom knows what you’re doing because she sees what you’re doing from inside your own eyes and head, no matter where she is and no matter how you try to not think too loud about it.

It was more than unfair. I didn’t know one other kid who carried their Mom around inside his head. Nobody but me. My best friend Greg had no inner voices at all. He showed no twinge of conscience, no inner torment over climbing into dangerous trees or throwing pop bottles up over his head. He’d toss them way up and it would be Mountain Dew green catching the sunlight, a beautiful slow motion arc and then “KSSSHHH” into a million sparkling emerald bottle gems and he would watch it all without any hint of an uh-oh anywhere.

He was filled with pure joy, all by itself. Just a great feeling of satisfaction that he wore on his face for anyone to see. I couldn’t do that. I mean, yeah, I broke pop bottles just like he did, but I was never able to fully enjoy it. Or anything else. I always tried to smile and laugh about smashing and breaking things like he did, hoping it would pull my heart along to feel that joy for real, but it never worked. My Inner Mom was always right there, stuck in my head, ready to be disappointed about whatever Bad Thing I might decide to do. And then, any stray happy feelings I’d try to muster up would shrivel into a hot, crinkly wad in the pit of my belly. I would have to flex my cheeks to work up a smile, but the smashing bottle gems lost their brilliance as I struggled with an overwhelming urge to race home and confess to any number of sins, anything to get the monkey off my back and the mom out of my head. This meant that I just stood there, staring across Shipley, at the long stretch of Princess Street that led all the way up to the Clinton Public School. I stood there. I sighed. And I waited.

But being prone to pre-crime guilt and therefore safe from being struck by a parade of speeding cars racing north on Shipley didn’t mean that I was completely safe as I stood there sighing and waiting. There were lots of other problems to face, nasty ones, shaped like big, lumpy kids also walking home from school. They all seemed to know exactly what I was doing there, and I was forced to listen to their intense mockery but, without Anita there to love me no matter what, my ability to ignore such cruel taunts was much reduced.

“Hey little kid, what are you doing way over there by yourself on the baby side of the road?”

They must have seen me as the most hilarious thing ever and they knew full well that I couldn’t go across Shipley Street so the same mean older boys would stand in the same place day after day and say the same things and laugh the same big laughs every time. And when they ran out of real laughs, they did fake laughing until it got funny enough for them to start up real laughing all over again.

They said many other mean things as they faced off against me from the opposite corner.

“Hey sissy, are you waiting for your girlfriend?”

I did not answer. I would not give them the satisfaction.

“Are you going to play Barbies with your girlfriend?”

I ignored their yapping, pretending to look up at the trees at squirrels and then, actually looking at the squirrels. You know, if I was a squirrel, I could jump across Shipley St, climb out on those long, skinny branches and just nip over to the other side and-

“Are you going to kiss your girlfriend?”

I froze, looking back down at these snotty faced creeps across the road. Was I going to kiss my girlfriend? I sure wanted to, but I couldn’t tell these dummies that. I couldn’t explain how much I wished I could kiss her a thousand times, right on the lips.

But I didn’t need to tell those dummies anything. They already knew what I was thinking and my transparency made them howl with laughter and then called me all kinds of terrible names, but lucky for me, I didn’t know almost any of the words they used. In spite of that, the tone of their shouting was enough to cut me to the quick. I gritted my teeth nearly hard enough to break them, inwardly furious that I had no effective way to punish these nasty boys for their enthusiastic cruelties. During the first week of school I had hurled many small rocks and violent thoughts at these smart-mouth older boys, but since I didn’t want to go to jail, I couldn’t allow myself to throw with my full strength, so none of my projectiles made it across the road. Believe me, I was plenty strong enough to injure them, but they just laughed at me and said I couldn’t throw hard enough to even hit the ground, which was obviously not true. “Everything hits the ground!”, I shouted as I threw rocks to the ground with great force as evidence. The fools! Why were these boys so stupid?

I ended up just giving them a devil stare, hoping that one of them would start up on fire or explode from the dark energy of my mind.

Sadly, there were no explosions.

My mom always told me that I needed to be the Better Man in such situations, but I would far rather have been the Tougher, Scarier Man who beat laughing bullies into submission and stood laughing over their battered bodies as they cried and begged my forgiveness.

Until I saw Anita.

She was walking like she had not a care in the world, dragging her jacket along the sidewalk and already smiling as she saw me. All the rage left my heart and the taunts of the older boys were meaningless. They could call me “sissy” and “girl-liker” all they liked, they weren’t fooling anyone. They were basting in the rich juices of their own envy, watching me soak up Anita’s glowing glorious attention.

She came towards me the same way every day: gleaming with excitement, happy to see me, happy to be in school, happy to be Anita doing anything, anywhere. The gleaming and the happy were good, but more and more every day she went into a numbing revisitation of this endless cycle of Kindergarten activities that wore me out after the first day. Did I know she had done some painting, and it was so much fun? And did I know she got to use scissors and she loved all the other kids and she loved her teacher and all the fun songs?

Yes, Anita, I did know. She gave me the same list every day with the same level of intensity and I was sick of it. I was sick of how happy she was in school, how happy every other kid was in school. She acted like she’d been paid to promote Kindergarten to other kids and she clearly thought she was doing a great job selling the whole experience, but the more she talked it up, day after day, the more it sounded to me like she was the cage-crazed wolf in the Grand Bend zoo wearing a dirt path to insanity along the fence it lived behind.

Everything was all the same, all the time.

Just the way she liked it.

I began to feel sick listening to how much she loved Kindergarten and it made my face sore to fake smile for her while she went on and on about it even though all I could think about was how many things she was loving that didn’t have anything to do with me. I ached to join her at school simply to be part of her Kindergarten world and maybe find a way to take back some of her deeply misdirected love.

But it was never going to work out and even though I was four and immature and stupid, I knew it. As the first week turned into the second and third, I was increasingly aware that my only job in our relationship was to listen to her unchanging list of her boring school adventures and reflect all her happiness right back at her, to make her fun that much more fun by saying yes, wasn’t it great and wow.

Wow for school.

Wow for her new dumb school friends who were all older and therefore better than me.

Wow for everything at this big, stupid, dumb school building full of people and toys and teachers and books and song and everything-

-except me.

The list of awesome things Anita did in school fell out of her mouth and clunked down into a growing pile between us, bricking up a wall I couldn’t take down because of how quickly she was building it up. And it was all because of school. School was driving us apart. I wished fire and monster attacks on its every brick and board with silent fury as Anita railed on every day, clueless to the fact that I was fading out further with every word, watching myself become a helpless bystander to my own collapsing relationship.

Finally, in October, after a particularly excruciating and detailed run-down on each of the incredible details that went into making a hand turkey (by tracing your hand! Imagine that!), she stopped herself mid-gush and for the first time in a month, actually looked at me. Her forehead wrinkled, and she appeared to be engaged in thought for maybe the first time since school had stolen her brain entirely.

A hot flash of triumph went through me. Had she finally figured out what was happening? Had it really taken her a whole month to notice that, not only wasn’t I sharing her joy, I was growing more miserable with every day and wearing that misery around like a gorilla suit?

I waited for Anita’s deepest apology, for her sudden flush of understanding and what I hoped would be many very sorry hugs to follow.

I imagined her shaking her head and snapping out of it, suddenly going back to be the same as she’d been before. I imagined her telling me that she would quit school and come back to the rhubarb patch, where we could be happy together. Only this time, it would be real happiness, real fun, really special and good. We would go back to the way things used to be. Back in the good old days before school.

But she didn’t do that. Instead, she suddenly shook her head, and made a sad face, then she spoke with a sad voice.

“You don’t understand anything I’m talking about, do you?”

I furrowed my brow at her. “What do you mean?”

If she had reached out and patted me on the head like my Great Aunt Ollie did, it would have been perfect as she told me not to be sad, because next year I wouldn’t be a little kid anymore. She smiled and nodded like she felt sorry for me. Like I was an idiot, a baby.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Next year you’ll go to school and you can do crafts and sing songs and learn to read books too.”

I froze a moment, looking up into her guileless blue eyes, then played back what she had just said. Tried to process the words.

“…learn to read books too.”

Learn to read books?

Learn?

To read!?

ME?

She kept talking, kept being sorry, but I didn’t hear any of it. I was too busy realizing that this girl didn’t know me at all. She had spent all that time with me, days and weeks of us talking and laughing and playing and clearly never once listening to a single thing I said!

She should be the one trapped on Shipley’s edge!

She should be waiting for me to come back with glue-smeared Popsicle stick-knacks to hang on the fridge!

She should be listening to me talking about what book I was reading!

Because I practically invented reading!

I did not need to go to Kindergarten to be told how to read books!

Who could read when he was two?

ME!

Not some floppy-hatted Kindergarten miscreant boy in a red cardigan making sissy jokes across the road, and was certainly not Anita!

IT WAS ME!

My mouth flopped open as I lost all muscular control over my face and I stopped walking as she recited a list of things I could look forward to when I was lucky enough to go to school next year. When she noticed I wasn’t walking beside her anymore, she stopped.

“Are you coming?”

For a long minute, I stood there looking at her, feeling the distance between us, the empty space, the nothingness expanding, growing.

“What are you doing?”

I stared at her face, so round and cute, her eyes so big and so blue against her blonde hair, so empty of understanding.

“I’m coming,” I said, and walked along with her.

We had lunch at her place and her mom didn’t want us to watch cartoons until we finished. We had to sit at the table and eat.

Baloney. Mayonnaise (yuck). Brown bread. Very thick, very hard. Crusts sharp enough to cut the top of my mouth.

It was a very bad lunch.

As soon as the farm news came on, Anita’s mom sent me home, saying that I should probably take a nap because I was pretty grouchy.

She was half right. I was grouchy but I didn’t need a nap. I needed something else.

Walking home, I felt a strange new feeling, a crackling line of energy, tension prickling my guts. It was like being hungry and having to wait for a snack, or waking up the day after Christmas, when the fun is over. It wasn’t the all-encompassing, lunch bursting panic I got when Mom and Dad went away, but it put a metallic clutch in the back of my throat, tightening my breath all the way down. It was the feeling of knowing that my once-beautiful relationship with Anita hadn’t ended on this day, it had been dead since her first day of school. On that day, she had entered a world so much bigger than the one I could offer her, so much more exciting than our simple life of eating rhubarb, watching bugs and laying side by side, close together in the grass. She had seen too much to go back to that kind of life.

The next morning, at the usual time, I went down to the end of my road to wait for Anita to cross Shipley Street, just like always. But this time, it was broken. I was only there out of habit, because I had nothing else to do. When she appeared, I tried to feel that old feeling, the excitement of true love but it was gone. I faked a smile and felt it sag, slide off my face and fought to stop from tearing up as I realized that Anita had never really come back from Kindergarten. Not to me. On that first day she left for school, she’d gone for good.

She was never coming back again.

The next day I didn’t go to meet Anita. I sat in my cardboard box in front of the TV and thought about how school wasn’t just a place made of walls, it made walls. School separated people who had once been truly together. It made the Same People into Different People, best friends into Christian Schoolers and Public Schoolers, girlfriends and boyfriends into Five Year Olds and Little Kids. Before people went to school they were all around the same age. Three, four, five, it didn’t matter as long as you could get out of the house to play and have fun. But going to school set up a barrier that even true love could not cross, no matter how much you wanted it.

That autumn was difficult as I tried to forget about Anita, but it could have been much more difficult if she hadn’t helped me. On a cold day in November, one of those days with a chisel wind chipping ice flakes out of dark clouds, I saw her walking down Princess Street.

She wasn’t alone.

Bobbing along under a huge tasseled toque that weighed as much as he did was one of those older boys who called me “girl liker”.

He was as with her as he could be, exactly the same as I’d always tried to be, walking beside her, turning to look at her face every few seconds, trying to smile at everything she said. I didn’t have the energy to get mad or make a scene by yelling something about black pots and kettles and irony and hypocrisy, and I also didn’t know those words yet. But I thought about lots of things as I watched them.

When they got closer, their voices got louder and I could hear what Big Hat was saying to her: “-and then we had dinky toys and made a garage under the blankets. I got the red truck. I beat up Harry. I can beat up anyone in that class. I’m strong. My dad is really strong.”

And then Anita giggled.

Yeah. She giggled as this little meathead wracked his peabrain trying to conjure up something he could brag about to impress her. I wondered how much she’d love me if I smacked that thick hatted moron to the ground and stomped his nose all over his face. If beating people up impressed her, she’d have to marry me on the spot, because of the pure rage I was planning to drop down on that fool. Until I saw Anita’s face when she walked past my window. As I watched her walk past my house without looking at it, I couldn’t help but see how intently she focused all of that same pretty, mindless enthusiasm she once burned into me on that stupid boy’s pathetic, no-brain Kindergarten exploits. She laughed and stared at this kid with amazement, like she had never heard of anything so incredible and I realized that she had done the exact same thing to me. She had looked at me with the same wondrous gaze, amazed to her core by whatever I told her, no matter how meaningless or banal. Or self-aggrandizing. Or stupid. Or pathetic.

In that moment I realized that Anita didn’t see the same world I saw. She didn’t feel all waves coming off of everything around her that I felt or she would know that this boy was bragging so hard out of desperation that she think he was cool. She took in at face value whatever was presented to her, just gobbling everything up whole. She didn’t suffer from an overwhelming jumble of twisting complexities screaming in her head that made you think about everything, didn’t live in a world where everything meant something.

In her world, nothing meant everything.

Anita’s life unspooled before as a stream of random stuff happening in a row that was all equally amazing simply because it was happening to her, whereas I’d only thought rhubarb was amazing because I was eating it with her. The sun on my face was amazing because I was sitting in it with her and I had assumed I was amazing because a beautiful girl like her wanted to be with me.

But I was wrong.

Upon seeing her unthinking excitement at that awful kid’s embarrassing attempts to boast about his Kindergarten wrestling skills, my feelings for Anita suddenly stretched out of my chest like a melty string pulling out of a grilled cheese sandwich, growing ever thinner as she walked away until it snapped, leaving a line of grease on my chin and a stinging burn that wouldn’t hurt anymore by morning.

After she walked away, I heard the John Street boys screaming on the dirt hill behind my house. They were playing King of the Hill, fighting and yelling and almost certainly threatening each other with cut off hockey stick rifles and arguing about who was dead.

I felt a jittery burst in my chest as something broke into a million pieces, and one wild thought flashed across my mind in violent red-

Who had matches?