Love Story

Meta: I wrote this story in October 2006, but with blanks in place of names, so I let a friend fill in the blanks right before I posted. I had some hope that this too would turn out to be a much longer story than it actually became, but alas, I moved on to other (though not necessarily better) things.

I might as well let you know up front, this is going to be a love story. Not the sappy, happily-ever-after kind of love story that you read about as kids, but the real kind; real characters, real feelings, real problems. How do I know they’re real? It’s no mystery, I cheated; too lazy to come up with an original plot and characters, I’ve borrowed heavily from my own experiences and the world around me. So if you’re holding out for that happy ending, forget about it. Real love stories don’t have endings.

I wish I could tell you that I fell in love with him while teaching him how to graph a cardioid function. That would be very fitting, very cute, but also chronologically inaccurate. As an eighth grader, I didn’t have a clue what a cardioid function was – we didn’t cover those until ninth. So the heart that I showed him on my graphing calculator that day was hand-plotted point by point.

I also wish I could tell you I was motivated to graph that heart as a not-so-subtle declaration of my love for him (in eighth grade, a girly crush and true love are seen as one and the same), calculating each point with great precision and care, but in truth I had no motive, and it also wasn’t my graph. My little brother had copied the figure onto my calculator off his homework assignment, and I was eager to present it to the first audience I could find.

“Hey Steve, check this out!”
“A heart? Cool, look at this.” He proffered a big squiggly star on his own TI in exchange.

“Whoa, how’d you graph that?”

“It’s a parametric function, how about yours?”
“Well, each point was plotted individually, see.” I showed him the list, but I was careful to avoid mentioning who had done the actual plotting. A thought tugged briefly at the back of my mind: “why do I want him to think that I did this?” but I shoved it away before it could become fully formed, before I could tack onto the end the words “for him”. And then I had a very bad idea.

“Kachina, look.” I tilted my calculator so that it was out of Steve’s field of vision, but still well within my friend Kachina’s, and I began to slowly type a name within the heart. L-U-K… wait! What was I doing? That should have been S-T-E. The damage had already been done, and for weeks I would regret allowing Steve to believe that my heart (literally) belonged to someone else. But I would not regret that moment, because that was the moment I realized that I had feelings for Steven Brown. Perhaps it was just a girly crush, but who’s to say that’s not the same as true love?

Four years later, a heart with the correct set of names mysteriously appeared one Saturday morning carved into the sidewalk directly outside Lobby 7 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.