I think about Roger a lot even though I know I shouldn’t. Roger was my first boyfriend – the guy that I fell in love with first. We were best friends in junior/high school. We were inseparable. I cared about him a lot. He was attractive, smart (way smarter than me) and fun to be around. Oh, and he was also a Mormon. We had know each other for several years, and then it happened. Actual intimate physical contact. I had wanted him for a long time, and when it actually happened I was stunned. If you had asked either one of us at the time we would have denied all knowledge of what was going on. We were busy checking out the girls and putting on the act for everyone else. I doubt we would have admitted the whole “boyfriend” thing to each other. God, we were young. We carried on in this fashion for a for a few years. Then came college. I went to a local community college while he went off to a nearby university. We saw each other whenever we could. He was busy being a history major. I was busy working full time and going to school full time. After graduating, he went off to USC in Columbia and we saw even less of each other. When he was in town one time, he told me that he had met this great girl at some church function and that they had really hit it off. My mind downplayed this because Roger liked guys. He had to be after what had happened between us. Shortly thereafter he appeared at work one day and handed me a book wrapped in brown paper. “You can open it later.” Then he was gone. I had received a copy of “The Book of Mormon” complete with a note saying that he had failed me as a friend by not witnessing to me about the Mormon religion. That he had failed me as a friend by letting certain things happen by “acting instead of reacting.” Well, I know knew how he felt. After finishing his Masters Degree at USC, he moved off to Washington State to get his P.H.D. at the University of Washington in Seattle. Then one day he walked into work with a wedding ring on. He and “the girl” had gotten married. I knew by this point things between us were over, but it still didn’t make it any easier. Roger and the new wife were in town about a month later and we all went out to lunch. I have not spoken to him since that lunch. They have a kid now. Who knows they may have more. I hear that he and the family are back in North Carolina somewhere. I don’t know where and don’t care to know.Is that petty of me? I sometimes feel like if I had made more of an effort to be around him during those initial college years that things might have worked out differently. Maybe he didn’t view us as being a couple. Maybe he thought that we were merely best friends that got together for some recreational fun. Maybe the Mormon religion would have gotten him in the end anyway. All this happened years ago. I think that time has tainted my memories of those days. That I am now, years later, making more of what happened than there really was. Whatever the case, the whole point of this is to say that I miss him. I miss him a whole lot.