A few days ago I learned of the death of a friend from my teenage years, a girl who was my first love. I left Ogden when I was seventeen and never saw her again, but I always remembered her and my feelings of affection remained. In 1980, about a dozen years after I last saw her, I had a vivid dream about her and the next day wrote a description of it as if I were telling her about it in a letter, which of course I did not send. Then, sometime around 2015–at an age when we start to think a little more about the past–I wrote again about my feelings for her. I described her then as “the luminous Mormon girl” and that’s what she was to me–luminous, sensitive and kind. When I try to tell anyone about her, I always feel like I have to explain that we were never boyfriend and girlfriend–not at all. So what was it? I still don’t know. Since I learned of her passing, she has been on my mind quite a lot. I never knew anything about her adult life. From her obituary I learn some salient details, which are all as I might have expected. Several times over the years I thought about what it would be like to talk to her as an adult. That was not to be. My love was always love from afar. It’s from a little farther now, but it’s still there.
