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, Part Six, and Part Seven.

I promise this will be the last lovey dovey chapter for a while. And this one — well, this one was different.

I still remember his full name. Jacob Liepshutz. Pronounced “lip-shuts,” not “lip-shits,” but get the giggles out now. He was short, about my height, with a bit of a squeaky voice and tufts of curly dark hair, and with these deep brown eyes that could see your soul. He was the typical nice Jewish boy you’d see in rom coms, the kind you would be happy to take home to your mama, with one important distinction.

He could fucking shred.

The band was called Smiles & Anchors, and their signature song was called “Shark Week.” It was a standard issue metalcore song for the most part, save for the very end, when Jacob would launch into the most captivating, triumphant guitar solo I’d ever heard in my eighteen-or-so years of life. And that’s when he won me over.

It wasn’t a crush I realized I held until the night I stayed with his family in West Bloomfield after a show. We had become decent enough friends for him to have offered to drive me out to see them in a town that was the opposite direction of where I was living. I felt bad for putting him through all the trouble, but he was happy to take me. By the time the bands had all played and he’d finished packing up his gear, it was far too late to make the trek to the other side of the Metro Detroit area. So I crashed with him for the night.

I stayed on the couch in the basement, and about ten minutes into me lying down, Jacob snuck into the room with me.

“Is it okay if I lie down with you?” he asked softly.

I knew what was going to happen if I said yes, but I did anyway. And I never regretted it.

The next morning, he drove me back to my little college town, and I still remember him playing “Shiksa (Girlfriend)” by Say Anything. “I have a girlfriend now, no way, no how,” the song sang as we rolled down the highway, me wrapped in his old varsity jacket. I never felt this kind of…was it love? I couldn’t figure it out. All I know is that entire day, as I went through the motions of my music therapy classes, I still felt his touch on my skin, and every time, I’d get shivers.

For that month, September, we were inseparable. Any chance we both had to be together, we were. I remember the night of Rosh Hashanah, lying on the beanbag chairs in my dorm, studying the freckles in his eyes as if there’d be a test. I remember meeting his parents and his little siblings and how kind they were to me. I remember him taking me to his old high school and showing me around the band room, where he’d spent so much of his time. I told him about how I played in my high school band and how I desperately wanted to make it in music as well.

One night, we sat in a parking lot while listening to the acoustic work of Buckethead, one of his favorite guitarists.

“I have a band too,” I said. “Well, a project. It’s called Wake Up Jamie.”

“Who’s Jamie?”

“Nobody,” I laughed. “It was a misheard lyric from a song I used to like. Where did Smiles & Anchors come from?”

His calloused fingertips interlaced with my own. “I make music because I want to see people smile. I don’t do it for myself. And what you’re doing with music therapy…that’s so admirable to me.”

I breathed a soft “thank you” and leaned into him. Asteroids could have decimated the planet in that very moment and I would have died happy.

Then, one day, it just…stopped. I stopped getting cute texts from him. He didn’t seem to want to hang out. I went to a Halloween show, and he barely acknowledged me. It was like a switch flipped. I was devestated.

It wasn’t until years later that I found out he’d been struggling with depression, much the same as I had been, and just kind of…fell off. He never meant to hurt me. In fact, he didn’t realize I felt so deeply about him. He went on to join another band and sign with a fairly major label, and I went on with my own life. We did eventually reconnect and casually dated again for a week or so, but nothing ever came of it. I was still heartbroken, but by that time, I had a million other things to be heartbroken about as well, like the breakup of my first official band, Dethklok (it’ll make sense later). I had to accept the hard truth that maybe Jacob Liepshutz wasn’t my soulmate after all.

Even still, I have an anchor tattooed on my foot in honor of that time in my life — not symbolizing Jacob himself, but what he taught me about music and about life. Music is great when you make it for yourself, but it becomes beautiful when you release it out into the world and let it affect the people around you. The anchor is a symbol to me to stay humble and remember why I picked up the noble art of music in the first place. Music is how I have always connected with people, and if I can use it to bring a little light into the lives of others, I’ll be happy. Jacob reminded me of that, and for this reason, he’ll always be a part of me.

Sometimes, the relationships you have aren’t meant to last forever, but they existed in that brief glimmer of life to teach you something valuable. And to me, that makes it all worth it.

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.

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, and Part Five

My first crush was Peter Frampton.

Peter Frampton was a British musician from the 70s, when you’re grandmother was young and hip. She’s the one who passed along her humble vinyl collection to me, including a Peter Frampton record called “I’m In You.” 

Now this album cover awakened something in me. Was it the fluffy blonde hair? Was it the tight purple pants? Was it the seductive pose? Was it the hilariously overtly sexual title? Maybe it was a combination of these things, plus my own burgeoning sexuality at the age of 12, that led me to feel weird tinglies I’m sure you don’t want to imagine your mother having. All I knew is I wanted to die and be reincarnated as this man’s talk box. Like, I’d never been so jealous of a plastic tube.

But shortly after Peter Frampton came Kyle Kelley. Kyle Kelley was not a British musician from the 70s, but a guy who was actually my age and lived in Michigan and was, you know, actually attainable. But he didn’t feel attainable to me at the time, because he was gorgeous and popular and I was still a tiny weirdo. He had floppy auburn hair with bangs that fell just above his sea-glass eyes. He was short, maybe an inch taller then me, but I could care less. To me, he was the most handsome specimen I’d ever laid eyes on.

We met at church youth group, something I’d been talked into while attending a wedding for one of my aunt’s family members. The youth pastor and his wife were in attendance, and with me being 13-ish and lonely, they figured inviting me to one of their events was the perfect antidote. And it was there that I’d find Jesus — and Kyle Kelley.

I was a little hesitant about the church thing at first, mostly because I wasn’t sure if there was anything supernatural out there at that point. But Kyle Kelley — he was supernatural, this otherworldly beautiful being to me. He looked like a literal angel. Not the terrifying Biblical five-billion-eyes-having angel, thankfully, but part of me was convinced that I’d still be madly in love with him even if he did have five billion eyes. He could be a disembodied foot for all I cared. I just wanted him — bad.

But alas, he was already spoken for. His girlfriend, Cati, was everything I wasn’t. She was a cheerleader (of course), tan and curvy, outgoing and likeable, and generally the antithesis of teenage me. I remember them joking about getting married someday, because doesn’t everyone marry their middle school sweetheart?

I had to do something to win him over, to make him notice me. Like, I did do a pretty mean performance at the youth group air guitar contest to Relient K’s “Sadie Hawkins Dance,” one of Kyle’s favorite songs, which got him to talk to me to congratulate me. It also won me a four-pack of Monster, which everyone joked I did not need after that. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.

We went on a couple of trips to the quintessential Midwest amusement parks, Cedar Point and it’s little sister, King’s Island. On the King’s Island trip, his parents were chaperoning, funnily enough, and Chelsea and I got to ride down with them. Kyle was too cool to hang out with his parents and us plebs, so he rode with the cool kids in the cool kid van.

When we finally got there, though, Chelsea and I found ourselves sucked into the cool kids group, somehow, as we all went to ride the biggest roller coaster in the park. Nothing of interest happened here, except that Cati insisted we pray before getting on the ride, and crazily enough, the ride malfunctioned the very next day and I think people died or something. I’d like to think Cati’s prayers spared us.

Cati was turning out to be a literal saint, somehow, which was not the plot twist I was expecting from the pretty, popular cheerleader. When we went to bed that night, she noticed I didn’t have a place to sleep, so she went out of her way to build me a comfy little nest out of couch cushions and blankets. And she made it a point to talk to me, the loser, whenever she saw me by myself (which was a lot). Suddenly, I felt a little guilty for daydreaming about ways to steal her man. She was so…good.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to steal her man, because they ended up breaking it off in eighth grade. I think Chelsea was the one who told me excitedly as soon as she got the news Kyle Kelley was back on the market. And I finally got my chance to show him how badass I was on our youth group trip to Cedar Point.

I don’t know exactly how it happened. He and his friends split, and I got separated from my friends, and somehow we ended up in line for the Millenium Force together. That warm late September night, we stood in the crowded line, so close our hands brushed several times, and he regaled me with stories of hockey and…well, whatever else he was into. This was middle school — not exactly a deep relationship, you know? He was Into sports, though, so I let him yammer on about that, hanging on his every word because he was Kyle Kelley and I was madly in love. When we finally got to the front of the line, he chose the front row seats. I mustered up all the courage in my body to sit down next to him in the front row. We tightened our seatbelts, the car began to move, and he leaned over and whispered to me.

“Keep your hands up.”

And I did. And in that moment, I’d never felt more alive. I was there, with who I believed to be the love of my life, racing through the night sky at breakneck speeds, hands in the air. When we finally landed back on solid ground, we traversed the park to meet up with the others, running through the arcade and laughing the whole time. It was like a movie, and if it had ended at that very moment, that would have been the “good” ending.

Unfortunately, happy endings are just stories that haven’t ended yet. (Isn’t that a Mayday Parade song?)

We didn’t get together immediately after that. It took a few more years of playful flirting and banter for him to finally ask me to be his girlfriend. And when he finally did, I guess it was a little more anticlimactic than I was expecting. Sure, we went through the motions of high school sweethearts, him picking me up for movie dates in his white Grand Prix and all that, but there something was missing. And we never kissed, not until one night at the end of youth group. It was our first kiss, and I had a gut feeling that it was also our last. His lips were like sandpaper. There were no sparks. We had nothing in common. Why was I even dating this guy?

I thought back to the countless nights I cried over at Chelsea’s because I was so scared I’d never end up with him. I remembered all the times I’d fantasized about that moment, our first kiss, and how badly my entire body ached to be close to him. And somehow, now that I had everything I wanted, I could see how shallow this puppy love really was. We were the gender-flipped Avril Lavigne “Sk8r Boi” couple, me the musically-inclined emo kid and him, well…his favorite back was Nickelback. I’d built my entire life around a dude whose favorite band was Nickelback.

My relationship with Kyle Kelley fizzled out with little fanfare, and to be honest, I wasn’t even hurt. Sometimes you need to get what you want to realize you never really wanted it. Sometimes, you just wanted the idea of it. I held onto this idealized version of him for so long, I couldn’t see what he really was — just some guy. And not even a guy I really connected with. In the end, he was just a guy.

If you enjoy my writing and want to help support me and this site, you can donate via Venmo (@jessjsalisbury) or CashApp ($TheJessaJoyce). Every little bit is greatly appreciated! Thanks for taking the time to read my work, and don’t forget to check back every few days for new content!

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, and Part Three

These stories are going to jump around a lot. I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. Probably.

I mentioned in the last chapter that I wasn’t exactly popular in grade school. I could count all the friends I had on one finger, and she didn’t even go to my school. That changed when I met Chelsea, though.

I don’t even remember how I met Chelsea. I’m pretty sure she was the cousin of one of the few girls in my grade who didn’t run away out of fear of catching the Unpopular when I approached them. Her name was Natalie, I think. It doesn’t matter. Anyways, I’m pretty sure Natalie and I got called lesbians by the other girls in our class, which is hilarious in hindsight, but I was one hundred percent not attracted to her. In fact, my big gay crush at that time in my life was my classmate Shelby Cox, who had the same dark hair with bangs and cute perky lips as Ann Wilson from Heat. It would be another fifteen years or so before I’d ever admit it was a big gay crush, though.

But I digress. I don’t recall our first interaction, but I’m pretty sure Chelsea stood up for me when another kid was committing an unspeakable act like calling me a lesbian (which is totally not true, obviously). And she was so. Freakin. Cool. She was younger than me by a year but already quite taller than me, and incredibly svelte, like a dancer. She had a splash of freckles across her pale face and dark hair cut into a stereotypical emo style. If you don’t know what that looks like, Cadence, just look at any pictures of me between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Chelsea was the one to inspire me to get that haircut, actually. This girl was unnaturally beautiful, like a punk-rock Snow White. And even better, she liked me! Not in a gay way, although in retrospect some of my burgeoning sapphic feelings were definitely directed toward her. Girls that don’t have baby queer fee-fees toward their middle school best friend don’t scream “All the Things She Said” by t.A.T.u. with them in the car on the way to Thursday night youth group. But for the most part, she was just this ridiculously cool girl who took a bizarre interest in being friends with the most unpopular girl in school.

I could list a bazillion memories with her, but I don’t think I could do any of them justice with words alone. We were inseparable. We were — dare I say — BFFs (best friends forever, if that term is antiquated by the time you read this). We had the quintessential teenage girl friendship. We went to the mall together. We went to the beach together (and freaked out because we thought we saw a jellyfish — in Michigan, mind you). We played in the mud on New Years Eve like absolute hooligans, and trick or treated like we weren’t too old. I remember we’d go to the aforementioned youth group and giggle together about the boys we liked there. One time, she tried to give me “cool” lessons.

“You don’t say ‘hi’ to a guy,” she said. “You have to do it all suave, like ‘heeeey.’” She immediately went up and demonstrated on her crush, this older hipster kid named Robert I think.

He never dated her, but she liked to think he liked her back.

Despite being younger than me, she was almost a big sister figure, the less-naive of the two of us. Another time, we were alone in her dad’s apartment watching Degrassi on her TV or music videos on a Stone Age version of YouTube or whatever it was we were into at the time. That’s when she discovered I’d never been kissed.

“Don’t you want to know how to impress Kyle Kelley when you finally get to make out with him?” she asked.

“It’s not like you’ve ever been kissed either,” I said.

“Watch this.” She grabbed a can of Coca Cola and placed her lips to the rim. “You just do it like this. Like, pretend the can is Kyle’s lips.” After her not-so-subtle demonstration, she handed me the can, which I clumsily fake-made out with.

“Oh Jessie, you’ll get there eventually,” she sighed.

Some of my favorite moments with her include the many times we dressed up like Bon Jovi and danced around the living room. She was always Richie Sambora because she had the darker hair, and I was Jon Bon Jovi. In reality though, she was the Jon of the friendship, the charismatic frontman, the natural leader, and I was her Richie, her trusty guitar-slinging sidekick.

The summer of my eighth grade year, we traveled up north with my parents and a mutual friend. If my memory serves me correctly, it was a pretty good trip. We stayed in a condo my brother’s family owned — I think it eventually got flooded and torn down, but it was beautiful at the time. We were right off the lake, just down the road from downtown Traverse City, and I savored every minute I got to spend with my dear friends. And I’m glad I did, because it all came crashing down when I got home and noticed the sunscreen we’d bought was missing. I sent Chelsea a simple message asking if she’d accidentally taken it home.

Her response knocked me backward.

“Why would you accuse me of stealing it, you lying (insert catty teen girl insult here)?”

My worst fears were realized. She’d fallen into the wrong crowd and was suddenly “too cool” for me. By this time, I’d switched schools, but it still hurt to lose her for such a petty reason. I’d go on to make a myriad more friends, believe it or not, and became quite the social butterfly over the course of several years. Still, I always held a tiny bit of a grudge against my childhood best friend for leaving me the way she did.

I wish this chapter had a happy ending. She reached out to me in adulthood after turning her life around, joining the military, marrying, and having a kid of her own. She was beyond apologetic for abandoning our friendship, but we never became as close as we were back in those halcyon days of youth. By that time, I’d moved on too, going off to college and touring with a band and eventually getting married myself. I never bothered to rekindle a meaningful relationship again, because I had my own life now.

And I’m kicking myself for it.

On the warmest Christmas morning, I got a message from a mutual friend that shook me to my core.

“Jessie, I’m so sorry about Chelsea.”

Turns out, she’d developed a rare cancer that eventually took her life. She was 27.

I wish I had a chance to get to know her as an adult. She’d grown up so much from the girl I knew and, by every account, was an amazing mother. She was an aspiring writer. She made art. She wanted to go into ministry. She absolutely deserved the sweetest, longest life. She deserved to watch her son grow up. And she deserved better from me. I wish I could have told her how much she meant to me before it was too late.

Cadence, you will have a revolving door of people coming in and out of your life every second you’re on this planet. Relationships don’t last forever, but love does. So while those people who mean the most to you are still around, shower them with all the love you have to give. Love so hard it hurts. Because someday, they’ll leave, or you’ll leave, or you’ll simply grow apart, or, like me and Chelsea, the grim reality of death will separate you until the next life, whatever that happens to be. You’ll regret a lot of things, but you’ll never regret love.

As the Red Hot Chili Peppers said in their song “Dosed,” show love with no remorse.

If you enjoy my writing and want to help support me and this site, you can donate via Venmo (@jessjsalisbury) or CashApp ($TheJessaJoyce). Every little bit is greatly appreciated! Thanks for taking the time to read my work, and don’t forget to check back every few days for new content!