Decoding a Secret Note from Long Ago...

Yesterday when I got up (I'm at home for the weekend to visit my family), I came downstairs and was almost immediately called into the kitchen. Mom and Heidi were looking at me with almost identical amused expressions.

"So guess what we found underneath the water tank?" Heidi asked. 

"It's very 'privat'," Mom added, "and it's addressed to you."

The first thing I thought of was Harry Potter because the way she pronounced 'privat' sounded like 'Privet'. I didn't know what to say, and looked back and forth between them. "What are you talking about?" I asked after a moment, baffled. 

Heidi then handed me a folded up piece of notebook paper, one that was slightly battered with a couple tea stains and the words: "Privat dont read" written in pencil on the outside. 

Before I read it aloud to Mom and Heidi, I glanced over it to reacquaint myself with its contents. As soon as I read the first line, I knew exactly what it was. This is what it said (spellings, grammar, etc. have been retained from the original): 

Dear Heather,

I was thinking and I Guess I Do like you, and well will you Go out with me? and about the butterfly hair hair clips I think you should Decide if you look better with them on or off. if you dont want to be my Girlfriend thats fine. and I think your cute too. Well if you want to Reply to this the sign it and put a yes or no beside your name.

Sincerely, Charlie

Mom, Heidi, and I laughed about it after I finished, but it got me thinking. My apparent vanity the note admitted to aside, if you would have asked me two days ago, I would have told you that there was no way I'd received a "yes/no" note in elementary school. Cue yesterday, when I realized how naive I'd been. Who was I kidding? Of course I'd gotten one; I would not remember EVERYTHING that had happened in school. As for the information gathered from reading this ancient note, I knew that I was in fifth grade when I'd received it (the mention of butterfly clips, which were all the rage at that point). I remembered the events that lead up to it. This boy was new at the time and I had a crush on him, and then proceeded to tell everyone at Girl Scouts about my feelings. Within a few days he knew that I liked him because it's the general tendency to pass on the information to everyone else in the fifth grade. I must have either written him a note or talked to him at recess to clarify information, and then he responded with this.

I don't think I "dated" him. I had had a couple of "secret boyfriends" after this note, but the sender was never either of them and since I was not allowed to truly date until I was 16, the two relationships in question never got any further than notes passed in class or exchanged tokens or one or two slow dances in seventh grade. I suppose my main concern after reading it yesterday was that I couldn't remember everything surrounding it. What else was going on? The note holds some sort of context long forgotten, weighing it down to a point from which I cannot retrieve it. And was he truly interested in being my boyfriend? Probably not, but at that age, it may be more of the idea of being closer with the people you fancy or the idea itself of having a significant others that drives kids to ask yes or no. It is the nearing the line between cooties of grade school and the hormones of the teenage years, where sexual experimentation reigns king and love gets complicated.

I haven't been in a relationship in four years, but in that time I've thought a lot about it. I know know that it's more than just "thinking someone's cute" (though I appreciate what the note had to say). There are also many kinds of love, and the kind of love that the note addresses is much different than the kind of love people my age search for. As we grow older, our understanding of the world becomes both clearer and much more complex. I fear that sometimes we forget that love is that complicated, and therefore what we think is forever reveals itself to be only temporary. I know that I've only felt that "strongly" about one person ever, and I never even dated him--and even then I still am not sure what our friendship entailed or if what I felt was truly this kind of love. It is different than the kind of love I have for my parents, my sister, my family, or my friends. I see the kind of love my friends and peers have with their significant others, the love that's declared daily on Facebook, both for newlyweds and babies. Everyday it seems more and more complicated. And when we toss around the word "love" like a frisbee, do we fully comprehend how what we say relates to what it is we're actually feeling?