you told me to go back to the beginning

it is december. the snow has fallen two feet deep and the sun has set. it is one of those nights that i believe only exist in towns like ann arbor, when the sky should be dark, but the snow clouds are low enough to reflect the lights of the city, and so the sky somehow turns a deep, impossible mauve. and we are all twelve or thirteen and bundled in our snowpants and mittens and scarves, blissfully trapped in the two hours of darkness we are allowed without adult supervision, until ben brainerd's mom comes to pick us up at 9:30. the cold is biting, our lips are chapped, and yet we tear off our coats and flush our cheeks and wrestle in snowbanks and sweat and laugh and tackle. it is december, and i am spending ben's birthday with all of our closest friends, tumbling towards something infinite.

twelve year old me climbs a deep embankment with emily and onny. everything looks like a postcard--the silhouettes of the trees, spindly and solemn, the backs of my best friends' heads. we have gone up and down this hill three or four times already, which of course translates to not enough. onny turns around and smiles at me.

two years ago, i was a girlfriend. onny and i would talk on the phone for hours, whisper into the receiver until one in the morning, learning our language. but even then my eye would wander, eleven years old, to the face of samuel gattis, and i told onny i wanted to be alone for the summer and called sam the next day. now eighth grade, three failed romances later, i found myself missing the three hour conversations, the language i had found with no one else. it is impossible for me to be any less hyperbolic--at the time i was sure i had found my true love. i was living in a movie and this was the part where the girl wanders lonely through the streets, staring up at his third story window, watching the lights go out, hanging her head in tears.

emily dives onto her sled halfway up, unable to wait, leaving me alone with onny. he is still smiling at me. my heart is doing double pike dives into my stomach. i try to concentrate on how cold my toes are and stare at anything but him. he stops walking. i am aware that we are alone on a snowy hill, beneath a pink moon, two lovers reuniting. i half-hear violins playing. i think i see fireworks.

"carol."

he, incredibly, is still smiling. my mouth won't work.

"do you want to go out with me?"

ah, the phrase of phrases, the words of legend. different in every school, in every town, the words we speak to ask someone out, go steady, be girlfriend and boyfriend, be together, are the words that echo back to us from the bathroom mirror, the words we whisper into our pillows at night, to that invisible someone, that onny had whispered to me over and over in my dreams.

i was speechless. "sure." meanwhile burying my head in the snow sounded like a great idea.

the rest, as they say, is history.

i write this because i just talked to onny on the phone for four hours, and remembered why i love him so much. it's not that i want to date him or kiss him or sleep with him, it's a much deeper and more honest love than that. he is one of those friends i can count on one hand, and one of the first people i was able to say that about. so this new year's, onny, i will raise my glass to you.