“You are a cool breeze on a calm sea.”  He wrote that on the last page of a paper I’d written for the class he taught.  There was an “A” in red ink, which pleased me not half as much as being compared to a summer’s day.  I was fifteen, just coming into focus.  I reminded him of himself, he said, and when he asked me to meet him at the football field on a Saturday afternoon I didn’t hesitate.  He drove me to his apartment, told me to take my clothes off in a way that made me uncomfortable.  But I liked having a secret.  

Later, much later, he told me he had a boyfriend, someone he loved.  He’d die if anything ever happened to him, if he were to find out what we did on Saturday afternoons.  So it stopped as abruptly as a needle being lifted from a record.  

What stuck with me wasn’t the rape, as my therapist insisted I call it, it was the power of words to seduce, to shatter.        

I moved around a few times growing up. Right before I moved across the country the summer after 9th grade, a close friend filled my yearbook pages with lovely memories but most importantly a note that said, “No matter where our lives take us and even if we drift apart, we’ll always have these memories from this past year.” Her words stuck with me after that and helped me get through the tough times when friendships faded or when I needed a push to see the bright side of things.

This friend and I did drift apart when I moved, but nearly a decade later we found ourselves living in the same city and our friendship picked up right where it left off.