This is the latest installment in my memoir project, written as a series of letters to my future daughter. Here are the previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, and Part Six
So Kyle Kelley didn’t work out, but I wasn’t too heartbroken, and part of that was because I already moved onto the next unattainable crush. And this one was scandalous.
But first, I want you to listen to a song called “Dear John” by Taylor Swift, an artist who is probably doing a nostalgic Vegas residency or farewell tour by the time you read this. To fully understand the situation, you need to put yourself in the shoes of a teenage me, crying on the swingset to this song sometime in 2010. Just like how Taylor had John Mayer (who’s probably dead by now), I had, well, let’s stick with John.
John was the anti-Kyle. He was this tall, dark, and handsome emo kid with long hair, skinny jeans, and a dangerous air about him, despite being a good little church boy on paper. He was one of the members of the worship team at the church I was going to. I remember every Sunday gazing up at him and his alpine white Les Paul hanging near his hips, his hands dancing over the fretboard like I could only dream of doing. I never paid him much mind until the worship team played a cover of “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey for an event. That guitar solo he played took me to another plane of existence. I had to have him.
Because he was technically a leader, it would have been frowned upon for him to pursue me, but that didn’t stop me from daydreaming about him constantly. I’d comb through his pictures on MySpace, where he was a bit of a minor celebrity, and look through all the comments from thirsty girls who wanted him as much as I did. But I was special — I played guitar too, and I loved Jesus too, and I knew I would understand him better than any one of those girls. I just needed to get his attention somehow, but at this point, I was still shy and awkward, despite having blossomed into a somewhat conventionally attractive young woman.
Then the crazy thing happened. He reached out to me!
I don’t remember exactly how it happened. I’m pretty sure he started a conversation with me on MySpace, then asked for my number. I was floored. John had finally noticed me, despite me having barely spoken to him in person (I think I asked him about his pedalboard once). We talked all night about everything — soup, favorite bands, his extensive hair care routine. And to my surprise, he continued to talk to me the next night, and the night after that. I was absolutely floored. Did he feel the same way for me that I felt for him?
Still, he never went as far as to ask me out or even talk to me in person. After this tango continued for several weeks with no moves being made, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I confessed my feelings toward him.
“I do like you a lot—“ he wrote back. “—as a friend.”
I was crushed. John meant everything to me. I’d gotten used to doodling my first name with his last name and imagining what our future children would look like. We were meant to be. I knew it. But I’d been — dare I say — friend-zoned by the love of my life. I realize I sound like an entirely unsympathetic “nice girl” at this point in the story, and John could have easily gotten away with looking like the good guy in this story, had he not done what he did next.
“Let’s play 20 questions,” he texted me one night, sometime around 2 a.m. “You go first.”
I was miraculously awake, despite having to get up in a few hours for school. “Favorite guitarist?”
“Jimmy Page.” Then came the message that changed everything. “Are you a virgin?”
A flutter of hope overtook me. Was he interested after all? “Yes,” I wrote back. “What do you look for in a girl.”
“A good heart and nice tits,” he responded.
It went back and forth like this for a while, getting increasingly steamy. I’m not going to gross you out with the details, but things got spicy, fast. Before I knew it, I had dropped any pretense of innocence and confessed all my filthiest desires to this guy, who had similarly dropped his facade of “respectable church leader.”
This went on for weeks. Every night, I’d fake going to bed and wait for the text from John. And every Sunday, I’d see him on stage, and he’d act as if he hadn’t told me how badly he wanted to touch my boobs the night before. When I did go to talk to him, he’d cut it short and go off to talk to someone else, almost like he didn’t want to be seen with me. It hurt so bad. I felt so close to him every night when he’d text me, yet he felt so far away in person.
Then my mom found out.
I remember her sitting me down to talk about it. She wasn’t mad at me, but at him for taking advantage of me.
“He doesn’t love you,” she told me. “He only wants your body.”
And it hit me like a truckload of hams. Of course he didn’t want to date me or even be seen with me. Socially I was below him — but he wasn’t above telling me all the nasty things he wanted to do to me. To me, he was my dream, my emo John Mayer in skinny jeans, everything I ever wanted. To him, I was little more than a piece of meat he could use when he was awake and horny in the middle of the night.
I left the church when I went off to college, but it wouldn’t be the last I heard of him. We eventually reconnected and had a short-lived fling, and I’d go on to marry someone else, but that never stopped him from continuing to pursue me. And the funniest thing happened. He fell in love with me! He’d tell me how he regretted what happened, how he wished he would have put a ring on it when he had the chance. By that time, though, I’d already long moved on.
As of writing, Taylor Swift just released a re-recorded version of “Dear John,” and it hits differently knowing how it ends. I wish I could go back and tell that heartsick teenager that she’d look back and laugh at the whole situation. Someday, John would realize what he missed out on. Sometimes I visit the Downriver area and drive past the places where I used to cry about him, like that old swingset. He could have had me. But now, I’m shining like fireworks over his sad empty town.
JESSA JOYCE 