Kostya

The first boy I ever loved was actually my brother. Despite him breaking my dolls and refusing to share his skates, at the age of three or four I used to tell people that when I grew up and caught up with him (he is 7 years older), I would definitely want to marry my brother.

All the thoughts of the innocently incestuous future had disappeared by the time I went to the first grade at almost seven and met my first age-appropriate and unrelated love. His name was Kostya (short for Konstantin); he was a brunette with blue eyes and very good at.. something. I do not really remember much about him. But bonding with a girl classmate Ira over her liking Kostya’s friend and me liking Kostya was a lot of fun. 

By the end of the first grade, having learned how to write and having had over a thousand whispering and giggling conversations with Ira about how we will still be friends when married to the corresponding classmate, I decided to take action. I wrote a love letter to Kostya, and my brother helped me. 

Of course, as a lady and such, I could not just go and confess my feelings in my own handwriting. No-no: I hunched over a piece of paper with several colored pens at my disposal and used an alphabet stencil to craft the following message:

“Kostya, I like you very much.
Love, your secret admirer”

My 14-year-old sibling approved the endeavor and the grammar and strongly encouraged me down the confess-your-feelings path. Looking back I think it was his way of avenging multiple cassettes, which I used to record myself singing over his favorite songs. Who knows anymore.

A most important lesson happened the next day at school. During the lunch break I sneaked the letter into Kostya’s backpack: my heart pounding in the throat, hands shaking, Ira at my flank. And I still remember how he acted when he found and read my confession: “Who did this?” he kept yelling with his eyes wide and angry. 

I was just glad I had used the stencil.

T.

It took me a while to fall in love again after the first-grade letter fiasco. I had crushes here and there, but nothing that warranted a written word. 

Post-divorce my mom found religion, bought us matching crosses to wear, and I started making friends in the church narthex, a small area between two sets of doors that lead to the Orthodox Christian church’s sanctuary.

The narthex happened to be the place inhabited by the “bell-boys” off-duty during church services, because the bell tower of that particular church was a free-standing structure just outside. They were two boys, D. and T., a couple of years older than me, from a different school in our small town, and they did not know I was infamous as an incessant straight-As know-it-all and treated me as a normal girl. In-between the times when they ran out to ring the bells, we hid behind the huge doors and chatted our lives away, sometimes even getting shushed by the parishioners. 

I am not sure when exactly I started liking T. more than a friend. At some point when staring at little trinkets through a store window, he told me that being friends with me made him want to study better, that I was a good influence. Or when D. and T. were pushing me on a swing in one winter, and I was wearing a long fur coat, and they did not notice and kept pushing the swing while I had slipped and was holding on for my life and screaming for the same reason, and then he carried me home, because I decided they broke my back. Or any other of the little fun, giggly, honest, and caring moments one could have in a close young friendship. 

I wrote about T. in my diary, and then I wrote him a love letter. 

I think it was the year when T. went to college in a different city. The letter was longer, messier, and I did not use a stencil. This time my brother was not around to give his ill-advised encouragement or otherwise, but I had a girlfriend, Katya, whom I trusted entirely to act in my best interests. Unlike myself, who could not possibly know better. I was going out of town and left the letter with Katya to read and pass to T., if she deemed it acceptable. 

Three weeks later, I received the letter back from Katya, my secrets kept, and love still unrequited. 

My friendship with T. kept strong. He gave me a huge red stuffed bunny for my birthday, and came often by my dad’s where I lived during my first years of college. He even rushed to my mom’s place when an earthquake shook our hometown over one weekend and got her down and outside from the 9th floor we lived on. I was not home, and he told me later he had had to wait for my mom to finish brushing her teeth while the whole building was starting to sway. 

I was just glad to have such a friend.