oh man.

when I was in elementary school, we used to have skate nights at a local "roll-o-rama", the kimberton roller rink. there was linda ronstadt music, disco lights, a snack bar and 250 4th graders trying to skate. 

the last song was always "stairway to heaven", without fail, and we would all attempt to pair up and find that girl/boy to "slow skate" with. what an excruciating moment, especially for someone like me (see above) it seems like our school was so sexually charged at a really young age. I remember talking about "making out" at age 8 and 9. I don't know, maybe we were normal.

one particular night, I had made up my mind to ask this girl from my neighborhood, the only other jewish girl in my school, to skate the final song. her name was marcy. she was quite popular. we were friends, as shown by her rating of me in the school "kissing book" that all the girls had made. It scored all the guys they would want to kiss on a scale of 10 down to 1. she told me that she gave me a 1 instead of a zero, "because we were friends." man.

so, they announced the final skate, and I awkwardly made my way towards her to ask. the lights had gone down to a deep amber brown, and the mirror ball began to rotate slowly. the first guitar picks of "stairway to heaven" began to echo through the rink. I got over to her, I could see she was looking for someone, and that someone was not me. I asked if she would skate with me. she tried to look at me in the kindest way she could, and told me that this other guy, had already asked her. I made some noise about how that was cool, and turned around to drift away.

it was so emotional, I was crying. why did it have to be so damn hard? why did I want that moment so much? where was my easy time, my normalcy? why was I this freak that no one wanted to kiss or skate the slow skate to stairway to heaven with? I knelt down to untie my skates, when I saw these adult feet in front of me. it was my friend's mother, a chaperone. "are you ok, are you crying?" she asked. I made the lamest excuse ever, "no, I've just got some dust in my eye." SOME DUST IN MY EYE! unbelieveable.

I've never forgotten that night. the silence I sat in when my parents picked me up from the rink, the lonliness I felt in my bed that night. the desperation. it wasn't until years later, when I was more myself, more who I really am, that the trauma of that moment was there for me. that going for it and weathering the hard times can bring about a better life.