To begin...

In order to represent the impact of Isaac's departure from my life, I have to first build him up to the extend I had done so many years ago. he must become a symbol of perfection. An unrealistic fantasy of a man. Beautiful. Open. Loving. Naive to the pain of the world and optimistic of all possibilities.

It was the summer when I was 15 years old that we met. A summer I look upon now as the time my teenage life really began. It was over this three month period of adolescence that I first became aware that boys actually noticed me. And I relished over this new found power.

When my freshman year of high school came to an end, a popular senior boy asked me on a date. A real one. My first. We went to dinner, caught a movie, and later over coffee he asked, "Do you even have any idea just how unbelievably beautiful you are?" I blushed. I had never been told I was beautiful by a boy before.

He was of course too old for me and I soon began seeing his more age appropriate friend, a boy my parents dubbed the Nice Boy from Farmington. He however was a bit too nice and after cheating on him a couple times with my delinquent neighbor, I ended things to begin a fling with a long-haired, pothead. Luckily it was on this self esteem high that I was floating when Isaac and I first met because had I not been the aggressor, things may never have started at all.