I was helping my sister go through some things over the weekend and found my yearbook from Sophomore year (1992-1993) in her closet.
I hadn't seen this book in at least eleven years, since that's how long it's been since I lived with my sister. And while I've never forgotten how my boyfriend at that time and I felt about each other, I did forget about the message he wrote in my yearbook for me.
He had small handwriting and used the entire inside-cover page to pen what is most likely the longest, most in-depth love letter I've ever received. In it, the phrase "I love you" (and also, "I ♥ U") appear twenty-two times. He described when he really realized he loved me, listed off specific things about me that he loved, and talked about the dismalness of the immediate future of our relationship. (I was moving to a town fifty miles away that coming June, we were both too young to drive, and home internet and free long-distance calling weren't common like they are now. Not to mention that his mother would rarely allow him to see me because she thought we were too young.) He also jokingly (but still alarmingly) threatened what he was going to do to me if I went out with someone else at my new school, and described what it was going to be like after we survived the next three years apart and got married when he turned eighteen. (I'm three months older.)
The marriage part never happened. In fact, I broke up with him about six months after I moved. Not because I didn't care about him anymore, but because having a boyfriend I could never see was depressing and just utterly impossible.
There were a couple of times when we could have gotten back together after we got our driver's licenses when we were seventeen, and especially when we were both seventeen going on eighteen and he went to a boarding school which was only about a mile from my house. The timing was never right, though. And probably, we weren't either, for various reasons.
But, wow. Re-reading his note to me reminded me that I really want to make sure I do justice to any and all teenager-in-love scenes/stories/subplots that I write. We were only fifteen years old, but we were each other's everything during that time. Maybe to the adults in our world we were "just kids" who didn't have a clue about love, but we didn't agree with that notion.
Looking back on it, I still don't agree.