My first love emailed me today.

I immediately felt like the flat chested, naive fifth grader I was when I first decided I wanted to bear his children. In my defense when you are brought up at home, much like my own children, away from day care you can become insanely attached to the other little people in your life. After all we played The Dukes of Hazzard together and he let me be Daisy. He tried in vain to make me understand Star Wars and what an R2D2 was. He broke out laser tag in the basement and pretended to be the chef from The Muppets, just for me. He made me laugh. But I was littler than him and the girls he hung out with when I was in fifth grade had boobs and the guys had mini bikes and some kind of collector card just screaming testosterone. I became a little sister to him and he became my idol.

I carried this flame with me for years. Even when I sprouted buds of my own and we would hang out he was the one for me. Even after he shot me in the eye with a rubber band and forced me to play Nintendo with him and his new girlfriend. The whole way to the day he left for the Army way over on the other coast. But then he came home to visit after basic training and that is when I had to let him go. His mother arranged to take us to the movies, there was four of us that night. Afterward when they took me home she stayed to chat with my mother, they had been friends for years, and left us to chat in the kitchen. I remember Bryan Adams playing on the radio, the song from Robin Hood and I remember going out into the summer night and standing on the cellar doors looking at him and listening to a distant storm. How I wished he would just kiss me. I told myself he wanted to, I could just see it in his eyes. As I grew older I would come back to that night and decide that it was a cross between longing and pain. And then shortly after that night news came back that he was in love and had proposed to a young girl. I was crushed. I think I was in the ninth grade maybe eighth. I hated her right from the very beginning because she stole him from me. The very mention of her name felt like a knife twisting in my heart. I had waited all those years to be good enough for him to love back. And now I felt as though he were being ripped from my very world. It was some time till I was able to get over this.

And now today, not even twenty years later, he is back in my life. We had lost touch and there was that touchy gray area between husbands and wives that make opposite sex friendships dangerous. It was best if we lived in our own worlds, in our own time, with our own people. Till today.

Today he is back in my life and I am so ecstatic because after all these years he can still make me laugh. He is still my swedish chef. I’m not preparing to run off and marry him anymore. I no longer view him as a baby daddy, I welcome him back into life as a long lost friend I have missed so very much. After an incredibly rough week this has been a blessing. Just from the few emails we passed back and forth I can tell that he still gets me. He is still that one that you run to with all the joys and trials of life. He still knows how to make people laugh and I love nothing more than laughing. I can read in his mail that yes, he missed me. Sometimes in life there are people that feed on each other and need each other. They stand above family, they are above lovers, they are part of your soul. When I was young he shared my soul, I can only hope that we can share it again. Once upon a time he was my bestest girlfriend, he knew most of my secrets he shared in my pain, now this is the fairy tale ending.