I take pride in my strong, enduring friendships with my past romantic partners. I’d be happy to have them all at the same dinner party.
My first love was my first editor. The summer of my junior year in high school, the state chose me to attend the 1986 Governor’s School for the Humanities. I went for the writing courses and submitted a short story for their student anthology. He worked as an editor for the collection.
It was the first time I fell hard for a guy, and also the first time I published a piece of fiction.
“A Shoeless Child on a Swing.”
(Y’all, it was an angsty, overtly homo “bully” romance in the guise of literary fiction named after a song on The Smiths’ first album. Could you die? I just pulled it off the shelf — the whole thing’s pretentiously written in lower case. Probably inspired by e.e. cummings’ poetry. I’m dead.)
That relationship was a long-distance epistolary monument to pining and heartache. We went away to college in completely different parts of the country.
But we always kept in touch, almost entirely through letters and then later by email. Sometimes a few years go by between messages, but he has a way of contacting me at serendipitous times.
Twenty-eight years after we met, when I was about to publish my first novel, he popped up. The setting for the book was the late eighties, close to a time when we’d first known each other. He was the perfect person to edit it.
The craziest part? The main character is wrecked over an off-page ex-boyfriend entirely based on him. He either amazingly didn’t pick up on it, or chose not to mention it.
My college boyfriend and I were roommates in the dorm and friends for over a year before we admitted we had feelings for each other.
We secretly fooled around for months without telling anyone or even talking to each other about it.
(Note to self: put that in a book.)
After we broke up, we remained roommates. We backed out of the relationship in reverse stages of how we got into it. We’d been friends, so there was an ideal to go back to.
Incidentally, we had a marriage pact. One that we never honored.
The man I was involved with at thirty was a true soul mate, in the platonic sense of the word. Our connection was so strong and joyful, it was confusing. It took some time to realize the relationship wasn’t sexually romantic, but we couldn’t imagine our lives without each other in it.
Twenty years later — around the time I started writing the Bear Camp series — he asked to tag along to my favorite campground. Just as friends.
The experience of that trip, blended with the marriage pact from the other past relationship, gave me the premise for a story.
(I was seeing plot bunnies everywhere.)
What would it be like to go to a clothing-optional campground as friends with an ex you still had feelings for and always thought you’d end up with?
It’s twenty years of intense, messy, beautiful emotional history portrayed in a single life-changing night.
(Spoiler alert: There’s only one bed.)
Have you read "The Cubby Hole"?
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Read the Bear Camp series by Slade James.