Weeklong Series: Young Love, Part One

Last time I was home in Alabama, back in April, I found the shoebox I formerly used to store all the notes my high school boyfriend Jacob - the first boy I fell madly in love with - wrote to me. I sat down and read through all of them, and was touched by their sweetness, youth, innocence, and sincere love. I decided then that I wanted to share them with the world somehow, and I contacted Jacob to ask for his permission to do some sort of project with them. He's married with a child now, and he told me he would probably be slightly embarrassed of what he had written, but gave me his blessing to do with them what I wished. This week, I'll post a new note from him everyday, leaving them mostly unedited. Regrettably, I don't have any notes that I wrote to him, so this coverage will be incredibly unbalanced. But it is what it is.

Most of the notes don't have dates on them, but they were all written between 2001 and 2003, when Jacob graduated, making some of them almost ten years old. We started dating when I was 15 and dated until right after I turned 21. Jacob was really artistic, and on a lot of his notes he would create drawings or write my name in a really cool script. I'll also post here any drawings included on the original notes.

I'm sharing these not to be overly forthcoming with intimate details of my life, but because I think they are such an amazing capsule of young love. I think back on this time of my life with only fondness and some lingering breathlessness, remembering what it felt like to be so enamored with another human being. Although I have loved others since then, nothing quite compares to that experience. The notes also have a tinge of sadness to them, since this relationship, like most things in life, eventually came to an end. But when we were writing to each other, we were unbounded by time, and simply assumed we would feel this way forever.

Jacob and I typically passed notes to each other before school or during lunch, and we read them during class or whenever we had time. The following note is especially amazing to me because it was written long before I decided to go to college at Ole Miss in Oxford.

--

Hey!

    I had an interesting first block... We talked about Faulkner a lot and his works. Most of his works intertwine with each other, like one major character in one book might be a minor character in another. He also uses the town of Jefferson in Yoknoptawpha County, Mississippi in a lot of works; Mrs. Frye says that the fictional names are actually Oxford in Lafette County, Mississippi, in real life -- but I don't know how she knows this. Supposively, he played with stream of consciousness too... which is really interesting.
    Anyway, I hope you do well this afternoon! I don't think you'll have any trouble making the [dance] team though... not from what I witnessed anyway.
   I think I hate my Sanish class partially because it's so loud. There is all sorts of talking, annoying voices, a loud teacher than knows little more than Spanish and French. ::sigh::
   I am glad that my classes are the biggest of my worries. But yeah, I'm looking forward to this weekend... Call me after your tryouts are over with and tell me how you did. This is long!
   I love you very very very very very very very very very very much.
   Jacob